Door in the Mountain

New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003

Jean Valentine

• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• ISBN:
  9780819573155
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Winner of the National Book Award in Poetry (2004) Since the 1965 publication of her first book, Dream Barker, selected for the Yale Younger Poets Award, Jean Valentine has published eight collections of poetry to critical acclaim. Spare and intensely-felt, Valentine’s poems present experience as only imperfectly graspable. This volume gathers together all of Valentine’s published poems and includes a new collection, “Door in the Mountain.”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.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• New Poems
• Dream Barker (1965)
• Pilgrims (1969)
• Ordinary Things (1974)
• The Messenger (1979)
• Home.Deep.Blue (1989)
• The River at Wolf (1992)
• Growing Darkness, Growing Light (1997)
• The Cradle of the Real Life (2000)
• Index of Titles and First Lines
• About the Author