The Messenger

Literature & Fiction

Valentine, Jean

Poetry

Farrar. Straus & Giroux

Ordinary Things

Farrar, Straus

Dream Barker and Other Poems (Yale Series of Younger Poets)

Ams Pr Inc

A poet speaks of the deaths and births that come within a life: alcoholism, womanhood, depression, marriage, motherhood, psychotherapy, sex, poetry.

The Cradle of the Real Life (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Wesleyan University Press

In Jean Valentine's first book, her poems transformed dreams into living experience by means of luminous language that echoed the unconscious mind's revelations. In her later books, she almost reverses this process to show life as veiled and inconclusive, suggestive rather than definitive. The elliptical yet lucid craft of her poems presents experience as only imperfectly graspable. The poems ride lightly on the waves of thought, more textures than statements. Some readers have characterized Valentine as a "deep image" writer, but syntactically her work is more akin to the work of Mandelstam and Paul Celan than to that of Lorca and Neruda. The Cradle of the Real Life is divided into two sections, the shorter first section dealing with loss and death and the longer second section, entitled "Her Lost Book," which weaves memories with various metaphors for writing, and deals specifically with the "problem" of women's writing. These finely wrought pieces take stark subject matter and make it shimmer; the poems take their shape as much from the absences as from the words, just as life is given meaning by the losses we survive.

Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003 (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

This volume gathers together all of Jean Valentine's published poems and includes a new collection, "Door in the Mountain."

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.

Following her National Book Award-winning Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003, Jean Valentine returns with a meditative and magical new collection. In Little Boat, Valentine continues her exploration of spiritual life, confronting the realities of aging and death in the serene and dreamlike voice so beloved by her many readers. Infusing even the most melancholy subjects with warmth and humanity, Little Boat explores such subjects as grief, ordinary objects, illness, and memory, carrying the reader into disparate worlds, rendering the complexity of our common experience through startling images. The poet's extraordinary juxtapositions blur the boundaries of the material world and the invisible, the given and the assumed, the present and the sometimes recently absent. Readers will find Valentine's quiet epiphanies on rich display here, as this much-heralded poet quietly merges the sorrowful and the sublime.

Little Boat (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Growing Darkness, Growing Light

Carnegie Mellon Univ Pr

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Valentine, Jean. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Valentine, Jean

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Valentine, Jean. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Messenger

Ordinary Things

The Messenger

Dream Barker and Other Poems (Yale Series of Younger Poets)

The Cradle of the Real Life (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

The Cradle of the Real Life (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003 (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003 (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Little Boat (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Growing Darkness, Growing Light