Salt is a distinctive assembly of poems by the multi-award winning David Harsent. Resting somewhere between fragment and exposition, these intense and primal pieces stretch out across the measure of the page in the form of brief utterances. One extends to sonnet-length, one consists of a single line; but each piece uniquely completes its own world, and at the same time shades on to the next as a succession of frames and stills and imaginings that lends light and colour in the round.'The poems in this book are a series, not a sequence,' the author explains. 'They belong to each other in mood, in tone and by way of certain images and words that form a ricochet of echoes - not least the word "salt".' Mineral, eerie, sensory, the poems in the collection are experienced as encounters - some with the surety of daylight, others in dream-life - that refresh with the turning of each page. Like little fictions passed through space from hand to hand, the writings build powerfully to make Salt an unforgettable volume from this most visionary of writers.
For now, the day seems to say, Let the ordinary amaze, it's the grace we hold . . .

Hamilton rests her sights on what can be apprehended from a bed, sofa, chair, or window, and named in the quotidian. These small recognitions ensure a life's weightiness, wariness, worthiness' Claudia RankineWho becomes familiar with mortalillness for very long. I was a stranger, &c.

Not everyone appreciates it, noone finds being the third personbecoming, it's never accurate,and then one is headed for the past tense. Futurity that was once a lark, a gamble,a chance messenger, traffic and trade, under sail. The boy touches your arm in his sleepfor ballast.

It's warm in the hold. Betweenship and sky, the bounds of sightalone, sphere so bounded. -from 'All Souls'In All Souls, Saskia Hamilton transforms compassion, fear, expectation, and memory into art of the highest order.

Judgment is suspended as the poems and lyric fragments make an inventory of truths that carry us through night's reckoning with mortal hope into daylight. But even daylight - with its escapements and unbreakable numbers, 'restless, / irregular light and shadow, awakened' - can't appease the crisis of survival at the heart of this collection. Marked with a new openness and freedom - a new way of saying that is itself a study of what can and can't be said-the poems give way to Hamilton's mind, and her unerring descriptions of everyday life: 'the asphalt velvety in the rain.'The central suite of poems vibrates with a ghostly radioactive attentiveness, with care unbounded by time or space.

Its impossible charge is to acknowledge and ease suffering with a gaze that both widens and narrows its aperture. Lightly told, told without sentimentality, the story is devastating. A mother prepares to take leave of a young son.

Impossible departure. 'A disturbance within the order of moments.' One that can't be stopped, though in these poems language does arrest and in some essential ways fix time. Tenderness, courage, refusal, and acceptance infuse this work, illuminating what Elizabeth Hardwick called 'the universal unsealed wound of existence.'