Why the Sea Is Salt

This volume of Kirkpatrick Sale's poetry, the first to bring together his work of over twenty years, is unusual in two important ways. First, the poetry is for the most part traditional in form, with rhyme and rhythm, though the lengths and metric schemes are often inventive. In an age dominated by free and sometimes wholly unpoetic verse-like playing tennis with the net down, as Robert Frost famously said-these poems for the most part adhere to conventional lyric principles and stand out as exa