Jean Valentine

Dream Barker and Other Poems. New Haven , Connecticut, Yale University Press, 1965. Home, Deep, Blue: New and Selected Poems. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Alice James, 1988. The Cradle of the Real Life. Hanover, New Hampshire , University Press of New England , 2000. In Jean Valentine's first book, Dream Barker (1965), her poems transform dreams into living experience by means of luminous language that echoes the unconscious mind's revelations. In the later volumes Ordinary Things (1974) and The Messenger (1979) she almost reverses this process to show life as veiled and inconclusive, as suggestive rather than definitive, as dreamlike. The elliptical yet lucid craft of these poems presents experience as only imperfectly graspable. The poems ride lightly on the waves of thought, more textures than statements. While in Dream Barker she refers openly to events such as first love, wedding, childbirth, and parenthood, by the 1970s her poems have become mistier and more private in their references. No premature conclusion mars the sense of emotional atmosphere as more important than external incident. She does not try to evade the pain of existence, and it is perhaps her sensitivity to pain that necessitates the oblique approach. She writes of the loss of love, separations, a child's death, or war without raising her voice, always without bitterness or self-aggrandizement. Valentine's reluctance in her 1970s work to refer overtly to her personal life evidently led to her interest in translation, a way of speaking through another poet's voice but leaving the reader to decide the extent of affinity between the two writers. Ordinary Things includes her translation of the Dutch poet Huub Oosterhuis's "Twenty Days' Journey," a moving meditation on the death of someone the poet has deeply loved. She seems attracted to the poem's dreamnightmare quality of grief, which is completely consuming yet is delicately expressed: "my body turns to mist but still stays alive, /an eye that will not close." This sense of love enduring beyond personal absence or presence also marks Valentine's own long poem "Fidelities," in which she is reading a letter from a lover. As she reads, her room becomes his, and the park is both present and remembered, becoming another field in which both are walking. Her world is softened and subdued, bounded by solitude, memories, and letters, peaceful days providing perspective on her life. Friendship is a major motif of The Messenger, and in memory she befriends her parents and old acquaintances and cradles and resolves her feelings for them. The poems are sometimes titled merely with a date, and they often quote the words of others in gently free-associative style, usually with a fragmented structure that is faithful to flickering thought. But thought no longer flickers in the new poems that accompany Valentine's selected work in the 1988 volume Home, Deep, Blue. Here a decided change is revealed, a remission of the subdued, near hesitant mood. More confidence and bravery, less fear of stepping out into experience, result in bolder syntax and images stronger in outline and in bright colors, with brown, blue, and white gold occurring in just the first two poems of the volume. Dream and memory remain prime motivators, but a new earthiness invigorates her reflections. The title "Awake, This Summer" encapsulates her rejuvenation; she has awakened, it seems, from circumstances that quelled her spirit and enchained her words. The season is summer; it is ripeness and love—new, blest, thoroughly enjoyed. This becomes even clearer in Valentine's collection The River at Wolf (1992). Many of the poems in this volume are set in the American West, some having been written at Ucross, a writers' retreat near Sterling, Wyoming, and all of them, even those on her mother's death, exude a sunlit physicality that strengthens her perennially tender thoughtfulness and sensitivity. Dreams themselves enact more vivid dramas, inviting freer