The Salt House

Like a treasure from the sea, this memoir is polished, luminous and elemental. Poet Huntington and her artist husband, Bert Yarborough, spent three seasons in a single-room ""dune shack"" on a remote Provincetown beach she describes as ""a place of such wild austere beauty that at first I had no word for its spaces, its dusty heat, the thrilling clarity of its air."" Her exquisitely written journal recounts the just-married couple's adjustment to each other as lovers and artists, living in isolation and sensitive to the seasonal changes from May to September. Their solitude is broken by occasional guests, trips to town and visits with other summer migrants, who populate the shacks--originally built by squatters on the tip of Cape Cod--slowly being reclaimed by the National Park Service as their owners die off. Called ""Euphoria,"" for the wind, their wooden shack measures 12 by 16 feet, has no electricity, and is 40-minutes down the beach from the nearest town. By no means a tale of privation, Huntington's memoir is full of rich observations of the stars, birds, sea, vegetation, dunes, of time itself and of the author and her mate. Her words resonate with a poet's sensibility: she describes fish as ""vital, immaculate bodies of streaming light, each one shining fire."" Despite the unromantic jacket photograph and awkward end-of-summer publication date, those who admire this sort of quiet, pleasurable style or are in thrall to beach life will find this slim volume a great companion. (Aug.)