'The Salt House: A Summer on the Dunes of Cape Cod'

by Cynthia Huntington (224 pages. University Press of New England. $22.95)

Newsweek.com book review, September 14, 1999

A one-room house, 12' x 16' to be exact, stands precariously on stilts in the sand, surrounded by dunes, woods, and waves on the thin, curling tip of Massachusetts known as Cape Cod. For three summers, a couple — two artists — lived in this space, sleeping in a bunk bed, drinking and bathing in water from a well, lighting oil lamps at night, making love under trees in the sand, and making themselves at home as transiently as a grain of sand. Poet and Dartmouth professor Cynthia Huntington has distilled her summers of life in the salt house, also known as "Euphoria," into a sublimely realized meditative book. She impeccably details the natural aspects of living with mice, moths, and birds, thoughtfully contemplates the notion of "home," and turns everyday interactions into philosophical musings.

For example, Huntington describes the tension in the shack with poetic acuteness: "Our seclusion and the physical intimacies of the shack make us jittery as we settle in, too aware of one another, exaggerating the effect of every word or gesture. Perceptions sharpen: I feel seen at every turn, caught up in invisible strands of awareness." With the same keen insight, Huntinton observe every part of the sandy, shifting universe she inhabits — down to the spider whose web hangs from the third step of the shack. "And though I walk across her wooden firmament every morning and make her whole universe shake, in that universe I do not, in fact, exist." Fortunately, in the universe of books at least, Huntington does exist.

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