The Salt Ecstasies by James L. White

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Reviewed by Adam Tavel
Graywolf Press, 2010, 63 Pages

It was with a dour scowl that I first eyed a slim, musty, and altogether grim copy of James L. White’s The Salt Ecstasies.  I was juggling the rigors of professorship while completing my MFA, and White’s was one of a dozen inter-library loans (most of which were rare and/or out of print) I needed to inhale upon arrival as part of my required coursework.  According to the card sleeved in its back cover, the book hadn’t felt a reader’s hands in years, and I bristled at being assigned a collection of poems seemingly forgotten by the universe.  What I quickly found within those yellowed pages, however, were the most candid, authentic, and compelling poems about American eros that I had ever read.

It is fitting, then, that Mark Doty’s introduction to this long-overdue reprinting of The Salt Ecstasies—originally published in 1982 and now beautifully redesigned by its original press, Graywolf, in their Re/View series—frames these plainspoken, wrenching poems by their courage to speak of the male homosexual experience in a milieu (the late 1970s) marked by its savage taboos and inchmeal progress.  The frankness with which these poems chronicle and ordain White’s own homosexuality is at the heart of The Salt Ecstasies, but perhaps their most enduring quality is their ability to express universal truths of sexual intimacy, fraught as it is with hunger and ecstasy and shame, in ways that resonate for readers gay and straight alike.

Time has done little for White’s weaker efforts—such as “Sunday Snow” and “A Colored Girl,” both of which feel like timid riffs on the theme of lost innocence—but such poems are few, and are overshadowed by the soulful vulnerability and masterful shifts in diction that shape The Salt Ecstasies and its vast emotional topography.  The tone is set with “An Ordinary Composure,” a superbly taut prose-poem that opens the collection.  Despite its length, the first paragraph is worth reprinting here in its entirety:

I question what poetry will tremble the wall into hearing or tilt the stone angel’s slight wings at words of the past like a memory caught in elms.  We see nothing ahead.  My people and I lean against great medical buildings with news of our predicted death, and give up mostly between one or three in the morning, never finding space large enough for a true departure, so our eyes gaze earthward, wanting to say something simple as the meal’s too small: I want more.  Then we empty from a room on Intensive Care into the sea, releasing our being into the slap of waves.

This verse-paragraph is startling for several reasons: White’s mastery of the Deep Image (“the stone angel’s slight wings”), the bitter but lyrical depiction of the growing AIDS epidemic (“my people and I lean against great medical buildings with news of our predicted death”), and above all else, the soul’s searching for “what poetry will tremble the wall into hearing.”  The result is a masterful ars poetica, and like the best poems in The Salt Ecstasies, White threads undisguised, and at times disparaging, vignettes from his life together without devolving into tawdry confessional reportage (unlike, say, the work of Olena Kalytiak Davis).

We see this frankness in “Making Love to Myself,” an unassuming narrative about masturbation that turns achingly elegiac when memory conjures a lost lover, so that the moment, and the poem, end with physical and emotional deflation:

I wonder if you remember what
we promised when you took the job in Laramie?
Our way of staying with each other.
We promised there’d always be times
when the sky was perfectly lucid,
that we could remember each other through that.
You could remember me at my worktable
or in the all-night diners,
though we’d never call or write.

I just have to stop here Jess.
I just have to stop.

In “The Clay Dancer,” a richly nuanced nine-part sequence, this same candor and intensity make the poem White’s greatest achievement.  Equal parts sex journal and self-obituary (the poet spent his final years suffering from an inoperable heart condition), White’s images sing with a naked grace, as in these surreal lines where an embalmer begins him dark work, only to find the speaker’s “open arteries discharged two white colts/…/their eyes toward still water, the blue grass and bean blossom.”

Doty’s introduction is dodgy on whether or not readers can expect a volume of White’s uncollected verse to appear in the coming years, but three once-lost gems have been included with this reprinting of The Salt Ecstasies: “Sleep,” “Whitefish Lake, Late Summer, 1978,” and a short autobiographical essay.  It is indeed curious that the aforementioned poems, both of which are commanding and polished, were ultimately omitted from the collection, but this reviewer is grateful that they have now taken their rightful place among their kin.

Only time will tell what fate ultimately awaits The Salt Ecstasies, as there will be no book tour, interview, or glamorous profile in Poets & Writers to accompany its resurrection, and such jockeying seems sadly requisite for a book of poems to find wide readership in our age of po-biz hustle.  One merely hopes that these poems endure, and with them White’s battered heart, for those with ears to hear.