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

Jean Valentine (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 2, 2007 | Series: Wesleyan Poetry Series

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Short, jagged works exhibit a primal fierceness while longer works tell straightforward stories about companionship and disappointment in this very mixed survey. Valentine won the Yale Younger Poets award in 1965 for a first collection (Dream Barker) whose gloomy rhymed visions suggested Lowell and Plath: "I am thrown open like a child's damp hand/ In sleep. You turn your back in sleep, unmanned." Like many other poets in those years, Valentine abandoned her early forms for a more direct free verse, suited to mysticism, to personal turmoil and to political protest: "slowly our exploding time/ gives off its lives." Valentine grew even more direct, and much more discursive, in the late '70s; if her middle period now seems very much of its era, the last decade has shown—and this solid volume confirms—a return to her strengths. The defiant, angular, yet propulsively emotional recent poems that occupy the first and last parts of the book should please both fans of Valentine's earliest poetry and fans of her strongly feminist middle period: subjects range from the nature of the soul to an obstetric fistula, a woman's prison, an emblematic scarab and an embryo "her head still floating/ listening listening/ to the Real Life."
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The New Yorker

Unlike the confessional poets who influenced her earliest verses, Jean Valentine has come to adopt a more skeletal approach to personal experience, preferring terse lyric fragments to continuous narrative. Her recent poems seem simultaneously well crafted and incomplete, like mosaics with missing tiles. While occasionally obscure, they often deliver wry inversions of conventional wisdom: "Do well in the world. / If you do well / we'll throw you away." References to alcoholism, dysfunctional parents, and estranged lovers reveal a more standard autobiographical impetus, but, through nearly four decades of work, the dream life is equally pervasive. The result is a world where even sex is "not the thing itself, / But a metaphor," and where a vision of Fellini in purgatory or an elegy to a child who died of aids calls to mind a dream's alarming lack of boundary between the dead and the living.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 308 pages
• Publisher: Wesleyan (January 2, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0819567132
• ISBN-13: 978-0819567130
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #267,340 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Jean Valentine is a rock star, November 21, 2004

By 

crumbcake (Rhinebeck, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003 (Wesleyan Poetry Series) (Hardcover)

She says the most with the least. Her poems to me are perfect. They are the ones you whisper to yourself. They are the secret things you would write in your school notebook when you knew no one was looking. They should be put line by line into fortune cookies and sold in novelty stores. The next time we are afraid of a country which is threatening us we should wage preemptive peace on them by skywriting these poems above their capitals. This is what poems sound like when your mother sings to you in the womb. These are what the lines in your hands say if you knew how to read them. This is music that drifts off in the wind. Who else would compare two old lovers lying in bed together to two worn pages of a children's coloring book, still warm from the crayons? Here is a special Valentine for you.

10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Finally, All the Poems, January 23, 2005

By 

John Matlock "Gunny" (Winnemucca, NV) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003 (Wesleyan Poetry Series) (Hardcover)

This is the ninth collection of poetry Jean Valentine has published over a period of forty years. This lush voloume gathers all of her published work for the first time, exhibiting her vast artistic range. She continues to be an important and original voice in American poetry. She writes poetry that opens and heals, which carries an intimacy that asks for nothing more or less than our presence.

Jean Valentine has been the recipient of many awards and honors, including some of the most prestigeous in America. She currently teaches in New York and spends a lot of time in Ireland.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Valentine is a Titan, November 16, 2005

By 

L. Mitchell - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003 (Wesleyan Poetry Series) (Hardcover)

Jean Valentine has had a rich career. This book brings together all her pervious volumes so the reader may see her progression from a passionate, visceral sapling, to a sturdy oak. Her poetry is emotive, poignant, with moments of sheer perfection. I very rarely enjoy a poets entire body of work, but Valentine holds fast in her verse over the years, evolving her message over time, but never losing her voice.

Everyone should own this book: there is a verse for every palate.