by Jean Valentine. State Poet of New York and National Book Award winner Valentine's poems are brilliantly concentrated and neatly faceted, forged in the heat and press of experience and rumination like diamonds within the earth. In meticulously measured lines of deceptive quickness, Valentine encompasses the full spectrum of life and death as she deftly limns vivid landscapes etched by change slow and irrevocable, such as an old, abandoned stable and its fields, where the poet sees deep down to buried horses, a cow, memories. Attuned as she is to spirit, Valentine is nonetheless unsentimental, facing hard facts about the grand scheme of things when she comes across just-born, now-doomed rabbits in the garden. Her poems possess the immediacy and gestural magic of cave paintings and the resonance of psalms, albeit with a wild and pagan streak, as in the wonderfully piquant Earth and the Librarian, and a series of keening, prayerful, praise poems to Lucy, our 3.2 million-year-old foremother. Sharply honed yet mysterious, Valentine's lyrics of longing, conscience, collapsed time and space, and the elemental are startling and resounding. --Booklist
(Check Catalog)
