Cynthia Huntington

This book is so exquisitely written, the result of careful observation and precise description, that I was relieved to stumble upon a rare superfluous phrase. It comes halfway through the book, and the author records examining a tree “with close attention.“ Well, nothing up to that point reflected anything less, nor did the rest of the book. I felt that I was reading a long prose poem.
The Salt House of the title was one of the dune shacks on the Atlantic shore of Cape Cod, north of Provincetown. I don’t know if it’s still standing. It offered no more than rudimentary shelter: an 8x12-foot room on stilts, fresh water from a pump downhill, and an outhouse. The rain came through cracks, and fierce winds divided to pass under and over the house. For three years, Huntington and her newlywed husband moved in each spring and returned to town in the early fall.
This stripped-down life encouraged them to spend more time outside than in, attuned to tides, birds, and fish in a way that usually escapes me unless I stop and focus. One nearby shack dweller brought a generator and a television, but Huntington and her partner had the Milky Way to watch after dark.
The book’s underlying theme is the question of what we mean when we call someplace home. The author had no deed; the lease was a handshake. She makes it clear that there is no permanence in life, or even in the universe, for that matter. There are only different forms of transience.
But oh, how beautiful while it lasts.… (mer)

This offering from my old college professor Cynthia Huntington is a well-above-average collection of spiky contemporary free verse. Somewhat startlingly, Professor Huntington's poetry bristles with explicit sexuality and harrowing depictions of drug use; there's a kind of feral Sylvia Plath as rock'n'roll burnout stranded in the rural wastelands of the American outback feel to it. The centerpiece of Heavenly Bodies is a long poem called "Shot Up in the Sexual Revolution: The True Adventures of Suzy Creamcheese," a feminist countercultural coming-of-age fable that exploits the iconography of the hippie dream -- all that macramé and army fatigues and communal vegeteratian chili -- without, quite, tipping over into cliché. It's as smart and funny as any poetry about the Sixties that I've read. Other poems, such as the haunting "House Gone to Hell" show the darker side of the anticline, with its "stale breath" and "terrible thirst."… (mer)