Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003 [Paperback]

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.The collected works of one of America’s most innovative poets.NEW POEMSAnnunciation
In our child house
Nine
The girl
Mother
Eighteen
She Sang
A Bone Standing Up
The Hawthorn Robin Mends with Thorns
Out in a sailboat
I came to you
Cousin
The Very Bad Horse
Once
So many secrets
Eleventh Brother
Once in the nights
Under the gold
The Windows
Go Clear
The Coin
October morning
I heard my left hand
In the evening
We cut the new day
Occurrence of White
How have I hurt you?
Do flies remember us
You drew my head
The little faintly blue clay eggs
Happiness (3)
Letter
I could never let go
The Basket House
The House and the World
In your eyes
Woman Leaving
Trim my hoofs
Two Poems for Matthew Shepard
The Blue Dory the Soul
The Rally
The Growing Christ of Tzintzuntzan
Sheep
To the Bardo
Rodney Dying (4)
Door in the Mountain
Monarch butterfly
My old body
Inkwell daybreak
The path between
The Night Sea
The Shirt
One Foot in the Dark
A welă5