Jean Valentine – författare

"As elliptical and demanding as Emily Dickinson, Valentine consistently rewards the reader."—Library Journal

In her eleventh collection—honored as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry—Jean Valentine characteristically weds a moral imperative to imaginative and linguistic leaps and bounds. Whether writing elegies, meditations on aging, or an extended homage to Lucy, the earliest known hominid, the pared-down compactness of her tone and vision reveals a singular voice in American poetry. As Adrienne Rich has said of Valentine''s work, "This is a poetry of the highest order, because it lets us into spaces and meanings we couldn''t approach in any other way."

From "If a Person Visits Someone in a Dream, in Some Cultures the Dreamer Thanks Them":

At a hotel in another star. The rooms were cold anddamp, we were both at the desk at midnight asking ifthey had any heaters. They had one heater. You areill, please you take it. Thank you for visiting my dream.

*Can you breathe all right?Break the glass shoutbreak the glass force the roombreak the thread Openthe music behind the glass . . .

Jean Valentine, a former State Poet of New York, earned a National Book Award, the Wallace Stevens Award, and the Shelley Memorial Prize. She has taught at Sarah Lawrence, New York University, and Columbia University. She lives in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of New York City.

"Jean Valentine has a gift for tough strangeness, but also a dreamlike syntax and manner of arranging the lines of . . . short poems so as to draw us into the doubleness and fluency of feelings."—The New York Times Book Review

Quietly marked by elegy and memory, National Book Award winner Jean Valentine''s thirteenth book is empowered by her signature clear music and compassion. Valentine leads us chronologically from childhood drawings and wartime memories to the present, where she addresses aging and the loss of loved ones. These poems of tender grace reflect on the small histories few ever fully see.

Shirt in Heaven

Come upon a snapshotof secret you, smiling like FDR, leaning on your crutches—

come upon letters I thought I''d burned—

I suppose you''ve got a place with lots of stairs.

I''m at the end of something, you''re at the beginning . . .

—dearest, they told me a surgeon sat downin the hospital morgue, next to your body, & cried.He yelled at the aide to get out.

His two sons had been your students.—me too, little-knowing—

Jean Valentine is the current State Poet of New York and author of twelve books of poetry, including Door in the Mountain, which won the National Book Award. She has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, New York University, and Columbia University, and lives in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of New York City.

Eighteen new poems extend the trajectory of Jean Valentine’s work. Included are selections from her four previous books: Dream Barker, Pilgrims, Ordinary Things, and The Messenger. Her themes of pilgrimage, time, and human connection are revealed in intense meditations.