John Freeman

Jean Valentine made her poetic debut in 1965 with a book called "Dream Barker," a title that aptly bugled the arrival of a sensibility unlike any other in American letters. During the sixties, while her contemporaries turned the blank page into a confessional, Valentine fashioned it into a magic carpet instead. Using an unflappable sense of poise, she transported readers to cloudy dreamscapes, where ordinary things take on secret menace and poignancy, her consciousness lurking in the corner like a bat.

"Door in the Mountain," winner of the 2004 National Book Award, collects four decades of Valentine's eerily beautiful work and adds a hefty selection of new poems. Read the book chronologically and you can appreciate the gradual winnowing down of Valentine's style. As with any poet, too, you can also infer the emotional arc of a life, from the heartbreaking honesty of the line, "God break me out of this stiff life I've made," written early in her life when she was with family and child, to the poem "Happiness," which replays a street encounter through the prism of the poet's weary gratitude.

In the newest poems, words trickle down the page like rainwater from a leaky storm gutter. To fully appreciate Valentine's care with language, slow down and watch the words fall.

"October morning -
Sea lions barking
On the off-shore rock

Autumn evening-
Seals' heads nosing through the pink Pacific"

It's a luxurious mandate, this quintessential style of Valentine's, for it gives the reader a chance to indulge a heightened awareness in the natural world, the passage of time, and the aural quality of language.

In the magnificently strange and mysterious title poem, Valentine writes in the voice of a hunter walking through the forest with a deer strapped to his back. No one will give him shelter. Tired and perhaps cold, the speaker beseeches: "Door in the mountain/let me in."

This book is a door to a wonderful mind. Open it.

"Door in the Mountain: New and Selected Poems 1965-2003"
By Jean Valentine
Wesleyan University Press, $29.95, 285 pages

(2004-12-07)

Also by John Freeman

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