Poet Mary Jo Salter to Read at Smith College

The Poetry Center at Smith College will host poet Mary Jo Salter at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 20, in Neilson Library Browsing Room.

Salter is the author of four collections, "Henry Purcell in Japan" (1985), "Unfinished Painting" (the 1989 Lamont Selection for the year's most distinguished second volume of poetry), "Sunday Skaters" (1994), and "A Kiss in Space" (1999), as well as a children's book, "The Moon Comes Home" (1989).

Educated at Harvard and at Cambridge University, Salter is celebrated for her inventive uses of traditional poetry forms and has received many awards, including a recent year in France on an Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship.
Of Salter's collections poet Carolyn Kizer wrote, "These are poems of breathtaking elegance: in formal control, in intellectual subtlety, in learning lightly displayed."

When the circle broke at last it wasn't silence
or speech that helped us, neither faith nor will
nor anything that people do at all;
love made us green for no sure cause on earth
and grew, like our children, from a miracle.

(excerpt of"The Twelfth Year" from "Sunday Skaters")

An editor of The Norton Anthology of Poetry and an Emily Dickinson Lecturer in Humanities at Mount Holyoke College, Salter lives in South Hadley, Mass., with
her husband, writer Brad Leithauser, and their two daughters.

Salter's reading will be followed by a bookselling and signing. For more information, call Cindy Furtek at (413) 585-4891 or Poetry Center Director Ellen Doré Watson at (413) 585-3368.

Contact: Marti Hobbes, mhobbes@smith.edu

January 31, 2001