The Surveyors

A beautiful new collection from Mary Jo Salter brings us poems of puzzlement and acceptance in the face of life´s surprises. "I´m still alive and now I´m in Bratislava," says the speaker of one of Salter´s poems, as she travels with her unlikely late-in-life love, a military man. She never expected to be here, to know someone like him, to be parted from her previous life; how did it happen? Time is hurtling, but these poems try to slow it down to examine its curious by-products--the prints of Durer, an Afghan carpet, photographs of people we´ve lost. The title poem, a crown of sonnets, takes up key moments in the poet´s past, the quirky advent of poetic inspiration, and the seemingly sci-fi future of the universe. Throughout, in a tone of ironic wonderment, placing rich new love poems alongside some inevitable poems of leavetaking, Salter invites the reader to weigh and ponder the way things have turned out--for herself, for all of us--in this new century, and perhaps to conclude, as she does, "That´s funny . . . "