Jean Valentine

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Information about the author.

Works

Door in the Mountain: New And Collected Poems, 1965-2003

Jean Valentine

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, death, and…

 

Little Boat

Jean Valentine

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.

 
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