258 Poetry for Students
ourselves, by our own interior experiences of
despair and hope, what that mountain is, what that
door is, what blocks us, what allows us entry. We
may be reminded of Hart Crane’s poignant “Per-
mit me voyage, love, into your hands,” or of Galway
Kinnell’s “The Bear,” two poems of vision quest,
though Valentine’s diction is the more spare.
This is one of Jean Valentine’s many dream po-
ems, poems of profound imagination, delicate and
sensual, fearless and magical, poems that often seem
to make her the heir of John Keats and of Wallace
Stevens. Her language is haunting in ways it would
be hard to explain. I don’t know why I want to say
a line like “The snow is over and the sky is light,”
over and over like a mantra, but I do. “Looking into
a Jean Valentine poem,” Adrienne Rich says,
is like looking into a lake: you can see your own out-
line, and the shapes of the upper world, reflected
among rocks, underwater life, glint of lost bottles,
drifted leaves. The known and familiar become one
with the mysterious and half-wild, at the place where
consciousness and the subliminal meet.... it lets as
into spaces and meanings we couldn’t approach in
any other way.
Yes, I agree, and then again, looking into Valen-
tine’s poetry is also like playing chess with a
master—you might think you know what’s hap-
pening on the board, how the game is developing,
and suddenly the other player’s bishop skids along
a border, a knight twists before your very eyes and
lands someplace you never thought of, a queen sails
majestically through your frail defenses. In “The
Messenger,” for instance,
Now I want to live forever
Now I could scatter my body easily
if it was any use
now that the earth
has rained through us
green white
green green grass
Did you expect that stanza closure? No, you
didn’t. Is it beautiful, is it mysterious? Yes, it is.
Does something within you, seldom touched, feel
touched by it? I hope so.
For there is no standard Valentine poem, no
predictable Valentine move. She writes hot love po-
ems and tender elegies. She writes short-line free
verse and long prose poems. She writes brilliantly
and painfully of dysfunctional family life and of
the life of the spirit; she can write about mental
breakdown, alcoholism, AIDS, and desire with the
accuracy of a scalpel and the sweetness of a flute.
One sequence of poems, “Her Lost Book,” contains
poems as devastating as anything written at theheight of fiminist rage, though the tone is utterly
controlled:
I was dark and silent.
The therapist said.
“Why don’t you wear lipstick?”
To J: “Does she lie on top?” To J:
“Don’t play her role.
Don’t give the children their baths
or feed them.”
Another sequence is about visiting a friend in
prison. Another is about the death of her mother.
She is unafraid to ask unanswerable questions like
“why are we in this life” or to cry “God break me
out / of this stiff life I’ve made.” She is part
Catholic, part Buddhist, she prays and she medi-
tates, she sees herself sometimes as a horse, she
sees the soul sometimes as a boat, she describes the
process of writing as listening.Often there is a
koan-like quality to the poems, defying rationality
in ways that help us break through to another di-
mension of the real. Often she makes me think of
a poem by the great Japanese poet Basho: “The
barn burned down. Now I can see the moon.”
In the new poems of Door in the Mountain,
Valentine continues an impulse toward the ardently
and intensely chaste, writing in a style more aus-
tere and cryptic than ever. Yet the poems strike like
the arrows of a Zen archer. Here is one more. “To
the Bardo,” that shifts before our gaze from loss
and confusion to illumination, the scarf up the ma-
gician’s sleeve, the trick we might all want to learn:
I dreamed I finally got through to C on the
phone
he was whispering
I couldn’t make out the words
he had been in the hospital
and then in a home
M was sick too
You know how in dreams you are everyone:
awake too you are everyone:
I am listening breathing your ashy breath
old Chinese poet:
fire:
to see the way.
Source:Alicia Ostriker, “Seeing the Way,” in American
Book Review, Vol. 26, No. 4, May–June 2005, p. 16.D. H. Tracy
In the following review of Door in the Moun-
tain, Tracy calls Valentine’s poems “disquieting”
in their progression from “abundance to their fleet-
ing and attenuated meaning.”Door in the Mountain collects Valentine’s
eight previous books (including Dream Barker,Seeing You