|
by: Jean Valentine
Amazon.com's Price: $13.95 Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 811.54
EAN: 9780819564061
ISBN: 0819564060
Label: Wesleyan
Manufacturer: Wesleyan
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 85
Publication Date: February 01, 2000
Publisher: Wesleyan
Sales Rank: 461331
Studio: Wesleyan
Related Items:
Editorial Review:
Product Description:
In Jean Valentine's first book, her poems transformed dreams into living experience by means of luminous language that echoed the unconscious mind's revelations. In her later books, she almost reverses this process to show life as veiled and inconclusive, suggestive rather than definitive. The elliptical yet lucid craft of her poems presents experience as only imperfectly graspable. The poems ride lightly on the waves of thought, more textures than statements. Some readers have characterized Valentine as a 'deep image' writer, but syntactically her work is more akin to the work of Mandelstam and Paul Celan than to that of Lorca and Neruda.
The Cradle of the Real Life is divided into two sections, the shorter first section dealing with loss and death and the longer second section, entitled 'Her Lost Book,' which weaves memories with various metaphors for writing, and deals specifically with the 'problem' of women's writing. These finely wrought pieces take stark subject matter and make it shimmer; the poems take their shape as much from the absences as from the words, just as life is given meaning by the losses we survive.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating: - Miraculousness
More can be learned about the writing and experience of poetry from Jean Valentine's work than from any other poet of her generation, which is one of the most remarkable America has produced. And unlike any poet of her generation she has never published a weak poem--apparently she never writes a poem unless it is to record what Roethke called a genuine upwelling of the unconscious, a wordless perception, or one beyond words; these experiences are expressed with a skill and restraint which approach ... Read More
Rating: - Valentine at the height of her powers--
What's most noticed about Valentine's work is its strangeness. Robert Hass writes, "...every time some shape of...recognition rises up in you as a familiar emotion, the poem veers off..." Adrienne Rich writes, "Looking into a Jean Valentine poem is like looking into a lake." The words of the poems in this book are ghostly--they are representations of the real things--which, like the objects in Plato's cave seem at the corner of our vision, vanish when we turn to look.
The truths of these ... Read More
|
