With this dazzling collection, J. P. White embarks on a windswept
journey through seductive, treacherous waterways. Conveying a stormy
sense of place defined less by geography than by the push and pull of
the mind at odds with circumstance, these bracing poems plumb the depths
of the sea and of the human heart in muscular, graceful language.
The Salt Hour wends its way from Lake Erie to the Sea of Cortez, from
the Aegean Sea to ice-choked Baffin Bay. From old sailors on the
graveyard watch to a young boy clinging to the sailboat's pulpit to
boats dousing their sails before the blue-black storm, The Salt Hour
evokes the very salt breath of the sea and the poet's need for
connection with the shore. As a restless traveler who takes us from
England and Russia to Nicaragua and the Caribbean, White pushes beyond
the boundaries of the lyric/narrative tradition to let more of the
world, more flux of the larger human condition rush in.
Drenched in color almost achingly vivid, The Salt Hour is an
extraordinary catch.
"J.P. White is a poet of grace, authority, and accomplishment . . .
again and again [he] arrives at the hard-word eloquence from which the
most enduring lyrics must be formed. White is also a richly various
poet, elegiac, political, and literary by turns. . . . The Salt
Hour/i> is a very fine collection indeed."
-- David Wojahn