The Salt Hour

by J.P. White

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, White's arresting images evoke 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.

103 pages, Hardcover

First published April 4, 2001

About the author

J.P. White is the author of two novels, Every Boat Turns South and The Last Tale of Norah Bow.

His sixth book of poems, A Tree Becomes a Room, was the 2022 winner of the White Pine Poetry Prize, selected by Danusha Lemeris. His seventh book, Rough Sea, was the 2024 winner of the Grayson Book Prize, selected by Chase Twichell. His poems, fiction, reviews and essays have appeared in many magazines over the last 50 years.

He 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 out of St. Louis Bay on Lake Minnetonka, near Minneapolis.