Jean Valentine

Visiting Poet

Jean Valentine

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.”

Select Poems

Jane is big

with death, Don

sad and kind – Jane

though she’s dying

is full of mind

We talk about the table

the little walnut one

how it’s like

Emily Dickinson’s

But Don says No

Dickinson’s

was made of iron. No

said Jane

Of flesh.

From THE CRADLE OF THE REAL LIFE (Wesleyan University Press, 2000)

So what use was poetry

to a white empty house?

Wolf, swan, hare,

in by the fire.

And when your tree

crashed through your house,

what use then

was all your power?

It was the use of you.

It was the flower.



From THE RIVER AT WOLF (Alice James Books, 1992)

About Jean

Personal Website
Poetry Center Reading Dates: April 2002, April 2013