Description
The collected works of one of America's most innovative poets.
Winner of the National Book Award in Poetry (2004)
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.
Product Details
| Publisher | Wesleyan University Press |
| Publish Date | January 02, 2007 |
| Pages | 308 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Paperback / softback |
| EAN/UPC | 9780819567130 |
| Dimensions | 8.7 X 5.8 X 0.9 inches | 0.9 pounds |
About the Author
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."
Reviews
"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
"This is a poetry of the highest order, because it lets us into spaces and meanings we couldn't approach in any other way... The known and familiar become one with the mysterious and half-wild, at the place where consciousness and the subliminal meet... In all her work, most astonishingly in this new book, Jean Valentine offers us the danger and depth of the ordinary, and we shiver with recognition and relief."--Adrienne Rich, about The River at Wolf
"This is a poetry of the highest order, because it lets us into spaces and meanings we couldn't approach in any other way... The known and familiar become one with the mysterious and half-wild, at the place where consciousness and the subliminal meet... In all her work, most astonishingly in this new book, Jean Valentine offers us the danger and depth of the ordinary, and we shiver with recognition and relief."--Adrienne Rich, about The River at Wolf
"I wholeheartedly endorse this book. ...It is acrobatically glorious, this collection, unparalleled in its commitment to balancing the unspoken with the spoken. To read it is fully pleasurable and easy and at the same time difficult, because each poem springs from the head of Wisdom."--Fanny Howe
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