Little Boat

by Jean Valentine

Following her National Book Award-winning Door in the New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003, Jean Valentine returns with a meditative and magical new collection. In Little Boat, Valentine continues her exploration of spiritual life, confronting the realities of aging and death in the serene and dreamlike voice so beloved by her many readers. Infusing even the most melancholy subjects with warmth and humanity, Little Boat explores such subjects as grief, ordinary objects, illness, and memory, carrying the reader into disparate worlds, rendering the complexity of our common experience through startling images. The poet's extraordinary juxtapositions blur the boundaries of the material world and the invisible, the given and the assumed, the present and the sometimes recently absent. Readers will find Valentine's quiet epiphanies on rich display here, as this much-heralded poet quietly merges the sorrowful and the sublime.

Genres: Poetry

84 pages, Hardcover

First published October 2, 2007

About the author

Jean Valentine (born April 27, 1934) is an American poet, and currently the New York State Poet (2008–2010). Her poetry collection, Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965–2003, was awarded the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry.

Her most recent book Break the Glass (Copper Canyon Press, 2010) was a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Her first book, Dream Barker, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 1965. She has published poems widely in literary journals and magazines, including The New Yorker, and Harper's Magazine, and The American Poetry Review. Valentine was one of five poets including Charles Wright, Russell Edson, James Tate and Louise Gluck, whose work Lee Upton considered critically in The Muse of Abandonment: Origin, Identity, Mastery in Five American Poets (Bucknell University Press, 1998). She has held residencies from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, Ucross, and the Lannan foundation, among others.

She was born in Chicago, USA, received bachelor of arts and a master of arts degrees at Radcliffe College, and has lived most of her life in New York City. She has taught with the Graduate Writing Program at New York University, at Columbia University, at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, and at Sarah Lawrence College. She is a faculty member at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She was married to the late American historian James Chace from 1957–1968, and they have two daughters, Sarah and Rebecca.

Reviews

[Nicola]

This book came alive on its second reading. In between readings, I listened to Valentine read aloud some of her poems. Her voice was so incredibly vulnerable that it felt bold to me. I don't pretend to always understand what is happening in her poems, but because they are so "little," they are so intense. When she doubles a word (or uses the motif of "halves"), you really feel and experience its (often uncanny) weight. Another intensity is her divergent forms! like the exclamation mark, only having Spanish in one poem (“La Chalupa, the Boat”), different gaps and spacing, colons, italics, etc. When I slowed down and read these poems aloud, I became almost preternaturally aware of her forms, and the psychological leaps enacted by these forms. These poems are by no means tame.

[Vincent Scarpa]

“Did you ever think
you could do something useful?
You know.
Radiant?” — “In Memory

[Jude Connolly]

The door is fallen down,
to the house
I used to try & pry open,
in & out,
painfully,
stiff tears.

I sit underneath the cottonwoods—
Friends,
what am I meant to be doing?
Nothing. The door is fallen down
inside my open body
where all the worlds touch.

[Janée Baugher]

Trite little poems. They're flat; don't transcendent. I wanted more interesting poetic lines and diction from a previous Yale series award winner. Have these brief poems gone deep enough, far enough?

[Jill]

I read this and then went make and read it again and read it some more. These lines caught me up the most:

Blessed are those
who break off from separateness
theirs is wild
heaven.

[Anna]

A few poems I love from this book:

In Memory

I was over at your place,
but you weren't there.
The window was covered:
a leafy gold screen,
but it was a gate, locked, double-locked,
and over that, thick double-velvet drapes--
And then, out of the winter blue,
there leapt from branch to branch this

monkey-armed woman.
Jumping on my back,
suffering things. She was
Addiction--I guess,
but life, too,
skating on axes on her frozen sea,
life demanding life!
Flying life,

demanding to not-know,
demanding to know.
You. Did you ever think
you could do something useful?
You know.
Radiant?


Hospital: Scraps

Scraps of hard feelings
left on the floor
winter material

But out the window
sun on the snow
Dressmaker's pins
--somebody's soul
a feminine glint in the trees


I was lying there

I was lying there, half-alive
in a wooden room at a Russian country place.
You sat by me quietly. It's true you left
sometimes, but came back, sat by me
kindly quietly.
Woodsman, would you go back to the little-
light-wrapped trees
and turn them on again?
The hide of the deer shivered
The summer wind riffled through my hair.
You are on
a long, patient, summer visit from death.
I am forgiven. Forgiving. To your place
the next to be born.


And two more:


Blessed are those
who break off from separateness

theirs is wild
heaven.


To my soul (2)

Will I miss you
uncanny other
in the next life?

And you & I, my other, leave
the body, not leave the earth?

And you, a child in a field,
and I, a child on a train, go by, go by,

And what we had
give way like coffee grains
brushed across paper...

Note: in the first poem "suffering" is in italics
and the proper spacing for "I was lying there" is not coming through

[Kitty]

I like the spareness of the poems. Then again, one has to be in the mood for it.
This was my favorite because I felt satiated, without having to chew too hard.

Hospital: Scraps
Scraps of hard feelings
left on the floor
winter material

But out the window
sun on the snow
Dressmaker's pins
-- somebody's soul
a feminine glint in the trees

[Sandra]

More ephemeral than other volumes I have read by Valentine, this one captures the lightness of life in choppy waters; the artist poling her boat through the passage between the birth and death with a reverence that has been won looking for the other which may be her own soul.

[Alissa]

strange, mysterious, spare, and full of wisdom

[Melissa]

I admire Valentine's use of workaday words, transfigured.

[Amy]

I don't love this as much as Door in the Mountain, but there are some beautiful pieces in here.

[Garoosh Barbarus Lacroix]

Minimalism...ehh. Its like choosing the eat an anorexic pigeon over a plump Thanksgiving turkey.

[Alyson Hagy]

Lean, haunting poems that draw emotion from deep wells. I can see why Valentine is considered one of our major living poets. I'm going to read more.