The River at Wolf
The River at Wolf
Jean Valentine
“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
May 1992
ISBN: 9780914086956
Available in print and digital formats.
Jean Valentine won the Yale Younger Poets Award for her first book, Dream Barker, in 1965. Her eleventh book of poetry, Break the Glass, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2010. Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965 - 2003, was the winner of the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry. Valentine was the State Poet of New York from 2008-2010. She received the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets in 2009 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2011. She has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the NEA, The Bunting Institute, The Rockefeller Foundation, The New York Council for the Arts, and The New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as the Maurice English Prize, the Teasdale Poetry Prize, and The Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Prize in 2000. She has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the Graduate Writing Program of New York University, Columbia University, and the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan.www.jeanvalentine.com
“This space is left empty to create a white space. To create a white separation block in these individual book pages, add a Quote Block”
Additional Praise:
“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
“This space is left empty to create a white space. To create a white separation block in these individual book pages, add a Quote Block”
More by the author:
“This space is left empty to create a white space. To create a white separation block in these individual book pages, add a Quote Block”
Featured:
Marina Tsvetaeva
Translated by Ilya Kaminsky & Jean Valentine
2014 Eric Hoffer Award for Poetry – First Runner-Up
2014 Montaigne Medal Finalist
2014 da Vinci Eye Finalist
Alice James Books Translation Series
Paperback with CD (readings in original Russian)
“This ‘homage’ to Tsvetaeva captures moments, lines, and fragments the way a talented artist captures an individual with a few well-placed strokes of charcoal. As artists understand, a faithful rendering is not always the best way to capture an individual, a scene, or an idea. It is not completeness or precision that are most important, but instead, intuition, empathy, and artfulness. And in this sense Dark Elderberry Branch succeeds brilliantly.”
—Gwarlingo
November 2012
ISBN: 9781882295944