I'm using Kinzie's book right now in a poetry class I teach. I think it's one of the few books to actually talk about the kinds of tensions that make poems work and not work. I'm especially impressed by her discussions of the way lines and sentences work with and at times against one another. I haven't read in any of the recent crop of books on prosody anything about the relationship of sentence to line, which makes Kinzie's work all the more exciting and original. And smart. I recommend this book to anyone who's really interested in the kinds of questions all poets must face. I wish someone would've given me this much information before I got to grad school. It's a terrific book, and not so hard to understand as the numbers of pages might suggest.

The Sea, The Sea has become one of my top five favorite books and Iris Murdoch one of my favorite authors.

In The Sea, The Sea, we meet arrogant, snobbish Charles Arrowby, a retired London theatre director. Charles has recently bought a house by the sea where he hopes to finish his pretentious autobiography. Many things happen, however, to disrupt this enterprise.

First, Charles discovers that one of the small town's inhabitants is his very first love, a love who disappeared from his life in his teens. Believing her to symbolize his lost youth and innocence, Charles becomes obsessed with her almost to the point of madness.

Iris Murdoch's books are all excellent studies of relationships and The Sea, The Sea is certainly one of her best. In it, the character of Charles lies at the center of a vast network of complex relationships and interpersonal interactions. Much of the novel is an exploration of how we, ourselves, influence what others eventually come to see about people and how they relate to them.

Although relationships take center stage in this novel, there is much symbolism and even a little of the supernatural. The sea is so ever-present in this book that it almost seems to be a character in and of itself. Charles reacts to the sea in many ways, some benign, some not so benign. The sea, itself, is portrayed as something that is untimately not able to be understood or controlled, much as is life.

Although this book is passionately moral, it is definitely not a treatise on how to behave in a moral fashion. In fact, many of Murdoch's characters could be said to be anything but "moral." The values and consequences portrayed in this book are done with such a skillful hand, that The Sea, The Sea sits head and shoulders above Murdoch's other books, good as they are.

Just like the theatrical world it explores, The Sea, The Sea, is a showy, dramatic and powerfully effective book. It is Iris Murdoch's masterpiece and a huge reward for any reader.

First of all, I'm not 3, I'm 31, but the "how old are you?" seems to stop at 12.

This really is one of those books that just swallows you up. The sheer tangibility of the details, the observation, and above all the immensely impressive way that the "fabulous" or "occult" is woven into the tale make this impossible to resist. It's long haul, but you don't begrudge a page. The character of the cousin, James, seems to me one of the most tantalising and fascinating characters in modern literature. The narrator's own egotism and ignorance prevent him from seeing this too late. Some remarkable, perhaps impossible things are never fully explained, and that, my friends, is life. I've read this book three times in the last five years and I still get surprised by it. I still wonder that anyone can write this well. It's not the turns of phrase or any inbuilt sense of "importance", it's the magnetism of the story and the completeness of it. How many writers can REALLY fuse people, landscape, narrative, the elements and religious philosophy together like this. Precious few. Read this book!

I started reading The Sea, The Sea, and halfway through, my boyfriend left it on a plane. I couldn't find another copy for almost a year, but meanwhile I read some of Murdoch's other novels, which I enjoyed. I've now read about 10 of her books, and The Sea, The Sea was by far the best-written and most moving. Murdoch closely scrutinized the minutiae of everyday life and managed to make it beautiful and worthy of consideration and appreciation. After finishing this book, I was unable to read her other novels for a while, because I thought so highly of it, but luckily I'm over that now. This novel may not appeal to some because Charles can be an infuriating and unsympathetic narrator, but ultimately his pure intentions redeem his extreme actions.