Volume 24 259
selected for the Yale Younger Poets series in 1965)
and several dozen new poems. You could say that
Dream Barkerwas her best book, but it was really
the only one that cared how it sounded, and she
subsequently lost even that limited appetite for
Plath-like musical lavishness:
How deep we met in the sea, my love,
My double, my Siamese heart, my whiskery,
fish-belly, glue-eyed prince, my dearest black
nudge
—From “First Love”
She writes in this book with a three-quarters
profile that enables certain voicings—her passing
indictment of Cambridge, for example (“Every
public place in this city / Is a sideshow of souls
swordswallowing pity”), is better than Cum-
mings’s. But the stance is made in part of disen-
gagement, and you sense that, although her poetics
faces the daylight world of a readership, the poet
herself would rather not. In subsequent collections,
the poet prevails by degrees. Valentine goes from
some form in Dream Barker(1965) to none in
Pilgrims(1969). The poems begin to feel reactive
and momentary, and solitude becomes a condition
which they can explore but not ameliorate. In
Ordinary Things(1974) she prays, “God break me
out / of this stiff life I’ve made.” In her translations
from the Dutch of Huub Oosterhuis, she is attracted
to the theme of blurrings and dissolving markings:
chalk lines on a floor rubbed off, footprints in the
snow blown over, sand rubbed into eyes. Some-
where around The River at Wolf(1992) the poems
on the page begin to seem like footprints of the po-
ems in her head, and mistrust of surfaces has gone
from a secondary consideration to a constrictive
condition.
What’s disquieting is that this progression
seems to have no proximate cause. She never ex-
presses revulsion at public language, and no single
private tragedy or crisis undoes her (though re-
cently someone close, I think a young man, is in
prison). Lately, the poems have little evident pat-
terning, although even in their privacy and dream
logic they bemoan their own aphasia. The last five
lines of the book are true, in their ephemera, to the
means Valentine has arrived at:
Snow falling
off the Atlantic
out towards strangeness
you
a breath on a coal
—From “Home”
But it is wrenching to see a poet erode herself
in this way, and, even with all the evidence of the
poems before you, be unable to reconstruct the
route they took from abundance to their fleeting
and attenuated meaning.
Source:D. H. Tracy, Review of Door in the Mountain: New
and Collected Poems, 1965–2003, in Poetry, Vol. 186,
No. 3, June 2005, pp. 257–59.Jean Valentine and
Richard Jackson
In the following interview with Richard Jack-
son of Poetry Miscellany, Valentine discusses what
the interviewer calls her “fragmentary vision”
and her relationship to the narrative voices in
her poems.[Poetry Miscellany]: Your poetry is unique in
the way it presents itself; it seems to be based upon
fragments, shifts in perspective, traces, frayings. As
you say in “Twenty Days’ Journey,” it is a world
of things “almost visible,” of “The blown away
footstep / in the snow.” Could we begin by talking
about the nature of the vision, this world, where of-
ten, it seems, “it was like touching the center and
therefore losing it, emptying it of what you might
have been able to hold on to” (“February 9th”).
It seems a world of deferrals, discontinuities, dif-
ferences, gaps.
[Jean Valentine]: I can only respond to your
first sentence here, very simply: that when I’m most
attentive, these “fragments,” etc., are very often
what I sense and feel; they are how I “get” this time
and place and the currents of my private and pub-
lic life and the lives around me. To try to clarify
this—not to compare—I think of, for instance, Paul
Klee’s painting, certain newspaper photos or doc-
umentary film scenes, or certain intricately plotted
mysteries.
In The Lives Around MeI include the work of
someone like Huub Oosterhuis (you quote next
from my version of his long poem Twenty
Days’ Journey,made with the Dutch poet Judith
Herzberg). To try a version of this poem, I had to
feel very close to it. There are still mysteries in the
poem for me, but I make out this much: a vision
of both personal and worldwide suffering of loss
and anguish, in which a personal and/or an Every-
man “I” undertakes a journey: a journey in search
of God, who is both present and absent in the poem,
and who also suffers loss and anguish. (I should
say clearly here that I haven’t had the chance to
talk with either Herzberg or Oosterhuis about this,
and I could be very far off.) The experience of that
journey is something I could only have known or
approached at all through Oosterhuis’s poem: butSeeing You