The Cradle of the Real Life

More can be learned about the writing and experience of poetry from Jean Valentine's work than from any other poet of her generation, which is one of the most remarkable America has produced. And unlike any poet of her generation she has never published a weak poem--apparently she never writes a poem unless it is to record what Roethke called a genuine upwelling of the unconscious, a wordless perception, or one beyond words; these experiences are expressed with a skill and restraint which approach the miraculous.

What's most noticed about Valentine's work is its strangeness. Robert Hass writes, "...every time some shape of...recognition rises up in you as a familiar emotion, the poem veers off..." Adrienne Rich writes, "Looking into a Jean Valentine poem is like looking into a lake." The words of the poems in this book are ghostly--they are representations of the real things--which, like the objects in Plato's cave seem at the corner of our vision, vanish when we turn to look.The truths of these poems aren't in the words, but in the heart of meaning loosely housed by the words. Valentine gently cloaks each "poem" in these delicate and quiet visions. Like the best sacred books one could finish the book in a single sitting without any idea of what has "happened" in the poems--or what has happened to oneself upon the reading. Like the best sacred books, this book's value is in suspending our rational thought, our desire for things to match up, whether syntactically or morally--and instead give ourselves over to the magic of the book, to enter its dream-world, the "luminous room" Valentine wrote about in an earlier book.As in a dream, we surrender our senses. We do not need great courage to do this. Jean Valentine will take care of us.This book is clearly the book of a poet who has decades of writing and life experience behind her. It is too easy to say the book is "full." In fact, I think it is not that at all. The book empties itself--it exists in a world of half-light, exists in a moment of filling--it is an active book, it thrashes, it breathes, it is alive.