The Surveyors

Lamont Poetry Prize winner Salter (writing seminars, Johns Hopkins) has been working with quiet excellence as a poet since the publication of her first collection in 1985. For all that, she wears her knowledge lightly; this, her seventh collection, is an understated register of life lived and the passage of time—recollections of childhood, her own and her children's; memories of a deceased classmate; and gratitude for the blossoming of new love. She is superbly skilled in the old appurtenances of meter and rhyme, deploying coincidences of rhythm and sound that only rereading discloses—but her ease extends to the freer lyric style as well. "So Far" is an outstanding success in this mode ("All we can say so far/ is that we suffer/ for nothing"). Salter also works the subtle harmonies of slant rhyme superbly in pieces such as "Today's Specials" and "Vierge Ouvrante." The greatest achievement in the volume is, fittingly, the Möbius strip-like sonnet corona "The Surveyors."