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" is a very fine collection indeed". (David Wojahn). J.P. White's previous poetry collections are "In Pursuit of Wings" and "The Pomegranate Tree Speaks from the Dictator's Garden". His work has appeared in "Boulevard", "the New Republic", "North American Review", "Sewanee Review", and other journals.
J.P. White spent his childhood summers sailing on Lake Erie. In the early 1980s, he worked delivering sailboats up and down the Eastern seaboard, to the Bahamas and the Caribbean. He currently sails a Cape Dory 25D out of St. Louis Bay on Lake Minnetonka, near Minneapolis, Minnesota. In the last 35 years, J.P. White has published essays, articles, fiction, reviews, interviews and poetry in more than 100 publications including The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, The Gettysburg Review, American Poetry Review, and Poetry (Chicago). He is a graduate of New College in Sarasota, Florida, Colorado State University and Vermont College. He is the author of four books of poems. Every Boat Turns South is his first novel. Visit the author online at www.jpwhite.net.
