As ultimately, a love story, Salt Pier is structurally perhaps a throwback to an earlier time. All the while trying to find its bearings in the 'natural' world, it follows an initially profoundly-alienated and self-alienated speaker along a developmental arc that begins in childhood and ends in a hypothetical present where a negotiated compromise with history allows him to finally know loving companionship. A reader may find it difficult to categorize this version of emotional closure as either comedy (in the strict sense) or tragedy, if one has to be had at the expense of the other. Perhaps in some ways it shares the spirit of Yeats' tragic gaiety. It is not embarrassed of its relatively straightforward structure any more than it is ashamed of its mostly uncomplicated diction or its occasional, fairly explicit use of meter and rhyme. Although its not afraid of difficulty, it stands against subjectlessness and pointless complexity in contemporary verse. It believes instead that there are too many other calls upon a reader's attention in this busy world to risk verbal superfluity or philosophical flamboyance of any kind. A story of personal liberation and discovery, it shuns empty agendas of theory for the ungovernable mystery of the tale.

Book Information
ISBN 9780822962175
Author Dore Kiesselbach
Format Paperback
Page Count 80
Imprint University of Pittsburgh Press
Publisher University of Pittsburgh Press