Book description
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. "Fine as
the early work is, it is the later books, The River at the Wolf, Growing
Darkness, Growing Light, and The Cradle of the Real Life that keep me
returning to this extraordinary poet whose voice is like no other. These
poems, which are a piece with the new work, are utterly compelling and
original." --Harvard Magazine JEAN VALENTINE won the Yale Younger
Poets Award for her first book, Dream Barker, in 1965. Author of seven
other books of poetry, including most recently Growing Darkness, Growing
Light (1997) and The River at Wolf (1992), she has taught at Sarah
Lawrence College, the Graduate Writing Program at NYU, and the 92nd
Street Y. Valentine received the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry
Society of America in 2000 and the 2006 Morton Dauwen Zabel Award given
by the American of Letters to "a progressive, original, and
experimental writer."
