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Title: ghost characters
Review: Salter's poetic prose at times reads too precious. Characters come and go, are left behind- vanish, in a picaresque of loss and despair. What kept me reading was Salter's evocative description of place. He has the ability to distill the essence of geography with the skill of a cartographer while holding fast to the invisible details that bring a terrain to life. Perhaps I am faulting Salter for the book he in fact aimed to write. Light Years is about what the poet John Ashberry calls "time's silent roar" and its indifference to all within earshot of its muted din. Salter's vaporous characters inhabit a ghost-like nether world intimating with each jaded aside: "We are here only for so long, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it." They remain on the page, never jumping full to life- obscure, shadowed, and with the pall of death lingering over them like a coming storm.
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