Poetry for Students

Volume 24 257

it felt. In the second section, the speaker refers to
a time when she is grown up and has found a lover.
How have her feelings about love changed? How
do they remain the same?

The speaker begins the second section almost
in the same way that she began the first. She is not
born of this lover, but there is a similar feeling that
she experiences. Like the mother, the lover has an
empty hand that is also made like a kite, but the
speaker’s experience with that empty hand feels so
much healthier. She does not lick fear from the
lover’s fingers as she had with her mother’s fin-
gers. Rather, for some unspoken reason, she feels
blessed for having been offered this empty hand.
She states, “I stood my fingers / in your blue finger-
spaces.” Sucking from the mother’s fingers brings
the notion of the mother’s having given nourish-
ment to the child, but that nourishment was tainted.
The mother was, in some way, superior to the child,
who was dependent on her, and her love was pol-
luted with fear. In the speaker’s adult relationship
with a lover, she is an equal. She does not put her
mouth to the lover’s fingers but rather places her
own fingers there. Her fingers fit with the lover’s,
intertwining where the fingers are not (in the spaces
between). This feels so much more like a healthy
relationship compared with the one with the
mother. The poet expands on this feeling of equal-
ity when she writes “my eyes’ light in / your eyes’
light, / we drank each other in.”

The remaining stanzas of the poem feel equally
more healthy, as the speaker dives past the fear
that she had inherited from her relationship with
her mother and finds the love, the “brilliance, at
the bottom.” Without even knowing the meanings
for the “mental lake,” the “last red inside place,”
the “middle of the earth,” and the many other
metaphors that the poet uses to conclude her poem,
readers can feel the changes in the speaker—her
happiness, her exaltation—that come about from
having seen, and felt, the other side of love.

Source:Joyce Hart, Critical Essay on “Seeing You,” in
Poetry for Students, Thomson Gale, 2006.

Alicia Ostriker
Ostriker is a noted poet. In the following re-
view of Door in the Mountain, she calls Valentine
“a poet’s poet” and praises her poems for striking
“like the arrows of a Zen archer.”

She belongs to no school but the school, if one
dares to mention it, of high art. She is a poet’s poet,
which means that she creates beauty, and has no
objection to mystery. In the era covered by her

work, as poetry has turned increasingly toward the

popular and populist, toward accessibility and the-

atricality, Jean Valentine has not turned, ever, from

the purity of an art that cedes nothing to fashion.

Yet she is as beloved as any poet writing today.

Born in Chicago, Valentine studied at Radcliff

College, has lived in New York for most of her life,

and has taught at Sarah Lawrence, NYU, Colum-

bia University, and the 92nd St. Y in Manhattan,

among other places, earning the devotion of gen-

erations of students. She won the Yale Younger Po-

ets Award for her eccentrically-titled first book,

Dream Barker,in 1965 (compare Adrienne Rich’s

A Change of World,which won the same prize a

generation earlier, in 1951), and while publishing

eight other books she has received numerous other

awards. Most recently, Door in the Mountainre-

ceived the 2004 National Book Award for poetry.

With this history, you might think “main-

stream.” But Valentine’s title poem will give you

a provocative taste of a voice like no other:

Never ran this hard through the valley

never ate so many stars

I was carrying a dead deer

tied on to my neck and shoulders

deer legs hanging in front of me

heavy on my chest

People are not wanting

to let me in

Door in the mountain

let me in.

Part of the magic here is that we cannot tell if that

last line is a beseeching request for something that

has not happened and may never happen—solace,

acceptance, renewal—or if it is a declaration of

something that has happily, against all odds, hap-

pened. It can be either. And we must guess for

Seeing You

Jean Valentine has

not turned, ever, from the

purity of an art that cedes

nothing to fashion. Yet she

is as beloved as any poet

writing today.”