Elementary Secondary Higher Ed Common Reads
0 0
Download high-resolution image Look inside

Open Shutters

Author Mary Jo Salter
Look inside
Paperback
$18.00 US
Knopf
On sale Jan 25, 2005 | 96 Pages | 9780375710148
Add to cart Add to list Exam Copies

See Additional Formats
Mary Jo Salter’s sparkling new collection, Open Shutters, leads us into a world where things are often not what they seem. In the first poem, “Trompe l’Oeil,” the shadow-casting shutters on Genoese houses are made of paint only, an “open lie.” And yet “Who needs to be correct / more often than once a day? / Who needs real shadow more than play?”

Open Shutters also calls to mind the lens of a camera—in the villanelle “School Pictures” or in the stirring sequence “In the Guesthouse,” which, inspired by photographs of a family across three generations, offers at once a social history of America and a love story.

Darkness and light interact throughout the book—in poems about September 11; about a dog named Shadow; about a blind centenarian who still pretends to read the paper; about a woman shaken by the death of her therapist. A section of light verse highlights the wit and grace that have long distinguished Salter’s most serious work.

Fittingly, the volume fools the eye once more by closing with “An Open Book,” in which a Muslim family praying at a funeral seek consolation in the pages formed by their upturned palms.

Open Shutters is the achievement of a remarkable poet, whose concerns and stylistic range continue to grow, encompassing ever larger themes, becoming ever more open.


“[Salter] . . . challenges us with the discovery that something lucid, forthright, and fantastically undisheveled might also be sublime.” —Stephen Metcalf, New York Times Book Review

“Salter . . . performs with deep pleasure and arresting artistry the paired arts of avid observation and the transformation of hectic experience into crystalline images, golden threads of narrative, and startling extrapolations . . Salter’s moves are so precise and gravity-defying, so astonishingly eloquent, the exhilarated reader feels as though she’s watching a gymnast perform intricate, risky, and unpredictable sequences, nailing each one perfectly.” —Donna Seaman, Booklist

“A mature poet at the top of her form. . . Delightful.” —Rochelle Ratner, Library Journal
TROMPE-L’OEIL


All over Genoa
you see them: windows with open shutters.
Then the illusion shatters.

But that’s not true. You knew
the shutters were merely painted on.
You knew it time and again.

The claim of the painted shutter
that it ever shuts the eye
of the window is an open lie.

You find its shadow-latches strike
the wall at a single angle,
like the stuck hands of a clock.

Who needs to be correct
more often than twice a day?
Who needs real shadow more than play?

Inside the house, an endless
supply of clothes to wash.
On an outer wall it’s fresh

paint hung out to dry–
shirttails flapping on a frieze
unruffled by any breeze,

like the words pinned to this line.
And the foreign word is a lie:
that second “l” in “l’oeil”

which only looks like an “l,” and is silent.
Copyright © 2003 by Mary Jo Salter. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
© Marina Levitskaya
MARY JO SALTER is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.  She is the author of eight previous poetry collections and a children's book, and is a coeditor of The Norton Anthology of Poetry. She lives in Baltimore. View titles by Mary Jo Salter

About

Mary Jo Salter’s sparkling new collection, Open Shutters, leads us into a world where things are often not what they seem. In the first poem, “Trompe l’Oeil,” the shadow-casting shutters on Genoese houses are made of paint only, an “open lie.” And yet “Who needs to be correct / more often than once a day? / Who needs real shadow more than play?”

Open Shutters also calls to mind the lens of a camera—in the villanelle “School Pictures” or in the stirring sequence “In the Guesthouse,” which, inspired by photographs of a family across three generations, offers at once a social history of America and a love story.

Darkness and light interact throughout the book—in poems about September 11; about a dog named Shadow; about a blind centenarian who still pretends to read the paper; about a woman shaken by the death of her therapist. A section of light verse highlights the wit and grace that have long distinguished Salter’s most serious work.

Fittingly, the volume fools the eye once more by closing with “An Open Book,” in which a Muslim family praying at a funeral seek consolation in the pages formed by their upturned palms.

Open Shutters is the achievement of a remarkable poet, whose concerns and stylistic range continue to grow, encompassing ever larger themes, becoming ever more open.


“[Salter] . . . challenges us with the discovery that something lucid, forthright, and fantastically undisheveled might also be sublime.” —Stephen Metcalf, New York Times Book Review

“Salter . . . performs with deep pleasure and arresting artistry the paired arts of avid observation and the transformation of hectic experience into crystalline images, golden threads of narrative, and startling extrapolations . . Salter’s moves are so precise and gravity-defying, so astonishingly eloquent, the exhilarated reader feels as though she’s watching a gymnast perform intricate, risky, and unpredictable sequences, nailing each one perfectly.” —Donna Seaman, Booklist

“A mature poet at the top of her form. . . Delightful.” —Rochelle Ratner, Library Journal

Excerpt

TROMPE-L’OEIL


All over Genoa
you see them: windows with open shutters.
Then the illusion shatters.

But that’s not true. You knew
the shutters were merely painted on.
You knew it time and again.

The claim of the painted shutter
that it ever shuts the eye
of the window is an open lie.

You find its shadow-latches strike
the wall at a single angle,
like the stuck hands of a clock.

Who needs to be correct
more often than twice a day?
Who needs real shadow more than play?

Inside the house, an endless
supply of clothes to wash.
On an outer wall it’s fresh

paint hung out to dry–
shirttails flapping on a frieze
unruffled by any breeze,

like the words pinned to this line.
And the foreign word is a lie:
that second “l” in “l’oeil”

which only looks like an “l,” and is silent.
Copyright © 2003 by Mary Jo Salter. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Author

© Marina Levitskaya
MARY JO SALTER is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.  She is the author of eight previous poetry collections and a children's book, and is a coeditor of The Norton Anthology of Poetry. She lives in Baltimore. View titles by Mary Jo Salter

Additional formats

Other Books by this Author

Related Articles

Subscribe

Penguin Random House Higher Education

© 2025 Penguin Random House

Back to Top
0
    • 0
    Wish List (0)