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Jean Valentine is the quintessential "poet's poet." Since winning
the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1965, she has published ten collections
of poetry to high critical acclaim. Among her distinguished fans is Adrienne
Rich, who writes: "Valentine's poems ask for a kind of reader that I
hope is still being born-one whose senses are unblunted by the heave
and crackle of bravura writing, of poetic muscle-flexers and weight-lifters." Spare,
intensely-felt, and often fragmentary, Valentine's cryptic, dreamlike
poems present experience as only imperfectly graspable. Says Seamus Heaney, "These
are poems that only she could write."
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