Jean Valentine - Böcker

Since the 1965 publication of her first book, Dream Barker, selected for the Yale Younger Poets Award, Jean Valentine has published eight collections of poetry to critical acclaim. Spare and intensely-felt, Valentine's poems present experience as only imperfectly graspable. This volume gathers together all of Valentine's published poems and includes a new collection, "Door in the Mountain."Valentine's poetry is as recognizable as the slant truth of a dream. She is a brave, unshirking poet who speaks with fire on the great subjects-love, and death, and the soul. Her images-strange, canny visions of the unknown self-clang with the authenticity of real experience. This is an urgent art that wants to heal what it touches, a poetry that wants to tell, intimately, the whole life.

Lucy / your secret book / that you leaned over and wrote just in the dirt— / Not having to have an ending / Not having to last. . . .And so begins Jean Valentine’s provocative new work, Lucy, a poem that pays homage to the three million-year-old skeleton of the earliest known hominid. With a deep sense of gratitude and profound longing, this poem celebrates the creative power of the female by introducing us to one of our oldest human ancestors. In a dreamlike and often fractured syntax that is vintage Valentine, Lucy, the “wildgood mother” of our species, can once again be heard.