The River at Wolf
Jean Valentine
"You have to keep listening to Jean Valentine's work, because every time some
shape of sadness or recognition rises up in you as a familiar emotion, the poem veers off,
leaves what you already know behind.... Her work is so subtly not what you think, and of
the spirit, and as fresh as water, or cool weather."
—Robert Hass
"Jean Valentine opens a path to a mature place where there is 'no inside wall':
rapturous, risky, shy of words but desperately true to them, these are poems that only she
could write."
—Seamus Heaney
"Looking into a Jean Valentine poem is like looking into a lake: you can see your
own outline, 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. This is a poetry of the highest order, because it lets us into spaces and meanings we
couldn't approach in any other way. 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 author
Jean Valentine is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently The Cradle of the Real Life (Wesleyan, 2000). Earlier books include Dream Barker (Yale Series of Younger Poets, 1965), The River at Wolf (Alice James Books, 1992), and Growing Darkness, Growing Light (Carnegie Mellon, 1997). She has been a Guggenheim Fellow, and was awarded the Shelley Memorial Prize by the Poetry Society of America in 2000. She lives and works in New York City.
Ms. Valentine's Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems will be released by Wesleyan in November 2004.
two poems from the river at wolf
