Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003

by Jean Valentine

Overview

This National Book Award–winning volume presents nearly forty years of the renowned poet’s work.

Between 1965 and 2003, Jean Valentine published nine critically acclaimed collections of poetry, including Dream Barker(winner of the Yale Younger Poets Award), Ordinary Things, and The River at Wolf. Spare and intensely-felt, Valentine’s poems present experience as only imperfectly graspable. This volume gathers together all of Valentine's published poems, presenting them alongside a stunning new collection.

Valentine’s poetry is as recognizable as the slant truth of a dream. She is a brave, unshirking poet who speaks with fire on the great subjects―love, and death, and the soul. Her images―strange, canny visions of the unknown self―clang with the authenticity of real experience. This is an urgent art that wants to heal what it touches, a poetry that wants to tell, intimately, the whole life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780819573155
Publisher:	Wesleyan University Press
Publication date:	12/13/2022
Series:	Wesleyan Poetry Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	308
Sales rank:	583,824
File size:	857 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

JEAN VALENTINE won the Yale Younger Poets Award for her first book, Dream Barker, in 1965. Author of seven other books of poetry, including most recently Growing Darkness, Growing Light (1997) and The River at Wolf (1992), she has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the Graduate Writing Program at NYU, and the 92nd Street Y. Valentine received the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America in 2000 and the 2006 Morton Dauwen Zabel Award given by the American of Letters to "a progressive, original, and experimental writer."

Read an Excerpt

Annunciation

I saw my soul become flesh breaking open
the linseed oil breaking over the paper
running down pouring
No one to catch it my life breaking open
No one to contain it my
pelvis thinning out into God

Table of Contents

<P>NEW POEMS<BR>Annunciation<BR>In our child house<BR>Nine<BR>The girl<BR>Mother<BR>Eighteen<BR>"She Sang"<BR>A Bone Standing Up<BR>The Hawthorn Robin Mends with Thorns<BR>Out in a sailboat<BR>I came to you<BR>Cousin<BR>The Very Bad Horse<BR>Once<BR>So many secrets<BR>Eleventh Brother<BR>Once in the nights<BR>Under the gold<BR>The Windows<BR>Go Clear<BR>The Coin<BR>October morning<BR>I heard my left hand<BR>In the evening<BR>We cut the new day<BR>Occurrence of White<BR>How have I hurt you?<BR>Do flies remember us<BR>You drew my head<BR>The little faintly blue clay eggs<BR>Happiness (3)<BR>Letter<BR>I could never let go<BR>The Basket House<BR>The House and the World<BR>In your eyes<BR>Woman Leaving<BR>Trim my hoofs<BR>Two Poems for Matthew Shepard<BR>The Blue Dory the Soul<BR>The Rally<BR>The Growing Christ of Tzintzuntzan<BR>Sheep<BR>To the Bardo<BR>Rodney Dying (4)<BR>Door in the Mountain<BR>Monarch butterfly<BR>My old body<BR>Inkwell daybreak<BR>The path between<BR>The Night Sea<BR>The Shirt<BR>One Foot in the Dark<BR>A weed green<BR>Fears: Night Cabin<BR>so wild<BR>I have lived in your face<BR>A goldfinch in the rain<BR>The grain of the wood<BR>The push or fly<BR>I would be<BR>Avalon<BR>Do you remember?<BR>Advent Calendar<BR>We didn't know each other<BR>Touch with your finger<BR>Noon in the Line Outside<BR>Inside<BR>Your number is lifting off my hand<BR>The Needle North<BR>The Passing<BR>In the Burning Air<BR>Little house<BR>Notes</P><P>DREAM BARKER (1965)<BR>First Love<BR>For a Woman Dead at Thirty<BR>Miles from Home<BR>To Salter's Point<BR>Lines in Dejection<BR>Sleeps Drops Its Nets<BR>Dejà-vu<BR>Sunset at Wellfleet<BR>Asleep over Lines from Willa Cather<BR>Cambridge by Night<BR>To a Friend<BR>Waiting<BR>Sasha and the Poet<BR>The Second Dream<BR>A Bride's Hours<BR>Afterbirth<BR>Sarah's Christening Day<BR>Tired of London<BR>Cabridge April 27 1957<BR>New York April 27 1962<BR>September 1963<BR>Riverside<BR>For Teed<BR>My Grandmother's Watch<BR>The Beast with Two Backs<BR>The Little Flower<BR>Sex<BR>Adam and Eve: Poem on Folded Paper<BR>Dream Barker<BR>To My Soul</P><P>PILGRIMS (1969)j<BR>The Couples<BR>Fireside<BR>Solomon<BR>In the Museum<BR>By the Boat Pond<BR>The Summer House<BR>Woods<BR>Her dream: the child<BR>Orpheus and Eurydice<BR>Goodbye<BR>Separation<BR>Thinking about Cain<BR>Dearest<BR>April<BR>Broken-down Girl<BR>Bin Dream West College East D-11<BR>Bin Dream #2 Interview with Stravinksy<BR>Death House<BR>Archangel<BR>Half an Hour<BR>Visiting Day at School<BR>The Child Jung<BR>Coltrane Syeeda's Song Flute<BR>Photograph of Delmore Schwartz<BR>The Torn-down Building<BR>Moon Man<BR>The Child and the Terrorist The Terrorist and the Child<BR>Night<BR>Pilgrims</P><P>ORDINARY THINGS (1974)<BR>After Elegies<BR>'Autumn Day'<BR>He said<BR>Forces<BR>Kin<BR>Anesthesia<BR>After Elegies (2)<BR>3 A.M. in New York<BR>Space<BR>Letter from a Country Room<BR>A Child's Death<BR>Revolution<BR>Three Voices One Night in the Community Kitchen<BR>The Knife<BR>Seeing L'Atalante<BR>"Twenty Days' Journey" by Huub Oosterhuis and translated from the Dutch with Judith Herzberg<BR>This Hate<BR>This Minute<BR>Couvre-Feu: after Paul Eluard<BR>Fidelities<BR>Susan's Photographs<BR>Ouside the Frame<BR>Forces (2): Song<BR>Notes</P><P>THE MESSENGER (1979)<BR>Beka 14<BR>Dufy Postcard<BR>The Field<BR>Living Together<BR>Here Now<BR>The Forgiveness Dream: Man from the Warsaw Ghetto<BR>Turn<BR>Prayer in Fever<BR>Working<BR>Silences: A Dream of Governments<BR>After Elegies (3)<BR>The Messenger - Two Translations - Huub Oosterhuis: Orpheus<BR>Osip Mandelstam: 394 - Solitudes - December 21st<BR>Sanctuary<BR>What Happened<BR>Turn (2): After Years<BR>The Burden of Memory<BR>February 9th<BR>"Love and Work": Freud Dying<BR>Letter from a Stranger<BR>"Actuarial File"<BR>Lines from a Story<BR>March 21st<BR>Notes</P><P>HOME.DEEP.BLUE (1989)<BR>Willi Home<BR>To Raphael angel of happy meeting<BR>Primitive Painting: Liberation Day<BR>Awake This Summer<BR>Mandelstam<BR>The Drinker's Wife Writes Back<BR>Birthday Letter from South Carolina<BR>The Counselor Retires and Then He Dies<BR>Juliana<BR>Visit<BR>Snow Landscape in a Glass Glode<BR>Everything Starts with a Letter<BR>About Love<BR>Little Song in Indian Summer<BR>The King<BR>High School Boyfriend<BR>Tonight I Can Write...<BR>Trust Me</P><P>THE RIVER AT WOLF (1992)<BR>X<BR>Spring and Its Flowers<BR>The Summer Was Not Long Enough<BR>Still Life for Matisse<BR>Still Life: in the Epidemic<BR>Ikon<BR>The Year of the Snake<BR>The One You Wanted to Be Is the One You Are<BR>Ironwood<BR>Bud<BR>To a Young Poet<BR>Foraging<BR>Alfred and the Abortion<BR>Redemption<BR>Seeing You<BR>The Free Abandonment Blues<BR>The First Station<BR>Night Lake<BR>The Badlands Said<BR>The Missouri Speaks<BR>The River at Wolf<BR>The Ring<BR>Barrie's Dream the Wild Geese<BR>Fox Glacier<BR>Lindis Pass Borage<BR>By the Tekapo River 100 Degrees<BR>After Consciousness of This Big Form<BR>Everyone Was Drunk<BR>In Fear (1)<BR>In Fear (2)<BR>In This Egg<BR>The Under Voice<BR>Come Akhmatova<BR>James Wright: in Memory<BR>Wish-Mother<BR>At Cullen's Island<BR>The Wisdom Gravy<BR>American River Sky Alcohol Father<BR>The Morning of My Mother's Death<BR>The Night of My Mother's Death<BR>Second Mother<BR>The Sea of Serenity<BR>My Mother's Body My Professor My Bower<BR>Butane<BR>At My Mother's Grave<BR>We Go Through Our Mother' sThings<BR>Death Asphodel<BR>To the Memory of David Kalstone<BR>The First Angel<BR>At the Door<BR>Yield Everything Force Nothing<BR>Alone Alive<BR>Flower<BR>Skate<BR>Guardian Angel in New York<BR>To Plath to Sexton<BR>The Power Table</P><P>GROWING DARKNESS GROWING LIGHT (1997)<BR>Rain<BR>Sick Away from Home<BR>Friend<BR>Homesick<BR>New Life<BR>Bees<BR>The Tractors<BR>River Jordan<BR>Night Porch<BR>World-light<BR>Snow Family<BR>To the Black Madonna of Chartres<BR>Tell Me What Is the Soul<BR>Mastectomy<BR>Secret Room Danger House<BR>Red for Blood<BR>Yellow for Gold<BR>Green for the Land<BR>Black for the People<BR>Home<BR>Long Irish Summer Day<BR>Dog Skin coat<BR>Fellini in Purgatory<BR>Elegy for Jane Kenyon<BR>You Are Not One in a Sequence<BR>Alcohol<BR>Where Do you Look for Me?<BR>Documentary: AIDS Support Group<BR>Poem with Words by Thornton Dial<BR>A Bit of Rice<BR>The Night Wally's Service Wally said<BR>Rodney Dying<BR>Rodney Dying (2)<BR>Father Lynch Returns from the Dead<BR>Mother and Child Body and Soul<BR>Soul<BR>Soul (2)<BR>The Mother Dreams<BR>Fistula<BR>Soul (3)<BR>Open Heart<BR>Listening</P><P>THE CRADLE OF THE REAL LIFE (2000)<BR>The Pen<BR>Elegy for Jane Kenyon (2)<BR>Black Wolf<BR>Mother Bones<BR>They lead me<BR>Your mouth "appeared to me"<BR>Mare and Newborn Foal<BR>Truth<BR>October Premonition<BR>Rodney Dying (3)<BR>November<BR>Labrador<BR>1945<BR>Leaving<BR>Running for a train<BR>The Welsh poet<BR>Radio: Poetry Reading NPR<BR>The Tower Roof<BR>For a Woman Dead at Thirty (2)<BR>The Blind Stirring of Love<BR>Little Map<BR>The Drinker<BR>The Drinker (2)<BR>Happiness<BR>Happiness (2)<BR>The I Ching<BR>He leaves them:<BR>Away from you<BR>Child<BR>Her Lost Book<BR>Index of Titles and First Lines</P>

What People are Saying About This

Adrienne Rich

“This is a poetry of the highest order, because it lets us into spaces and meanings we couldn't approach in any other way... The known and familiar become one with the mysterious and half-wild, at the place where consciousness and the subliminal meet... In all her work, most astonishingly in this new book, Jean Valentine offers us the danger and depth of the ordinary, and we shiver with recognition and relief.”

From the Publisher

"This is a poetry of the highest order, because it lets us into spaces and meanings we couldn't approach in any other way... The known and familiar become one with the mysterious and half-wild, at the place where consciousness and the subliminal meet... In all her work, most astonishingly in this new book, Jean Valentine offers us the danger and depth of the ordinary, and we shiver with recognition and relief."—Adrienne Rich, about The River at Wolf

"This is a poetry of the highest order, because it lets us into spaces and meanings we couldn't approach in any other way... The known and familiar become one with the mysterious and half-wild, at the place where consciousness and the subliminal meet... In all her work, most astonishingly in this new book, Jean Valentine offers us the danger and depth of the ordinary, and we shiver with recognition and relief."—Adrienne Rich, about The River at Wolf

"I wholeheartedly endorse this book. ...It is acrobatically glorious, this collection, unparalleled in its commitment to balancing the unspoken with the spoken. To read it is fully pleasurable and easy and at the same time difficult, because each poem springs from the head of Wisdom."—Fanny Howe

Fanny Howe

“I wholeheartedly endorse this book. ...It is acrobatically glorious, this collection, unparalleled in its commitment to balancing the unspoken with the spoken. To read it is fully pleasurable and easy and at the same time difficult, because each poem springs from the head of Wisdom.”

Editorial Reviews

Short, jagged works exhibit a primal fierceness while longer works tell straightforward stories about companionship and disappointment in this very mixed survey. Valentine won the Yale Younger Poets award in 1965 for a first collection (Dream Barker) whose gloomy rhymed visions suggested Lowell and Plath: "I am thrown open like a child's damp hand/ In sleep. You turn your back in sleep, unmanned." Like many other poets in those years, Valentine abandoned her early forms for a more direct free verse, suited to mysticism, to personal turmoil and to political protest: "slowly our exploding time/ gives off its lives." Valentine grew even more direct, and much more discursive, in the late '70s; if her middle period now seems very much of its era, the last decade has shown-and this solid volume confirms-a return to her strengths. The defiant, angular, yet propulsively emotional recent poems that occupy the first and last parts of the book should please both fans of Valentine's earliest poetry and fans of her strongly feminist middle period: subjects range from the nature of the soul to an obstetric fistula, a woman's prison, an emblematic scarab and an embryo "her head still floating/ listening listening/ to the Real Life." (Nov.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Valentine's winning the National Book Award proved to readers everywhere what the cognoscenti have known all along: this poet is one of the best at work in America today. Beautifully precise-as in music, there's as much here in the silence as there is in the sound-and radiant with the pain of being in the world, this collection offers us a remarkable career. (LJ 11/15/05) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

"Fine as the early work is, it is the later books, The River at the Wolf, Growing Darkness, Growing Light, and The Cradle of the Real Life that keep me returning to this extraordinary poet whose voice is like no other. These poems, which are a piece with the new work, are utterly compelling and original."—Harvard Magazine

"This is a poetry of the highest order, because it lets us into spaces and meanings we couldn't approach in any other way... The known and familiar become one with the mysterious and half-wild, at the place where consciousness and the subliminal meet... In all her work, most astonishingly in this new book, Jean Valentine offers us the danger and depth of the ordinary, and we shiver with recognition and relief."—Adrienne Rich, about The River at Wolf

"This is a poetry of the highest order, because it lets us into spaces and meanings we couldn't approach in any other way... The known and familiar become one with the mysterious and half-wild, at the place where consciousness and the subliminal meet... In all her work, most astonishingly in this new book, Jean Valentine offers us the danger and depth of the ordinary, and we shiver with recognition and relief."—Adrienne Rich, about The River at Wolf

"I wholeheartedly endorse this book. ...It is acrobatically glorious, this collection, unparalleled in its commitment to balancing the unspoken with the spoken. To read it is fully pleasurable and easy and at the same time difficult, because each poem springs from the head of Wisdom."—Fanny Howe

From the Publisher