Review by New York Times Review
"Why do they call the dead/the never-returners?" Valentine asks. Parents, friends, lovers and adored writers and artists come back to her constantly. "Even here/two days after you died/we talked on W. 17th Street -/Then everything complicated,/swift & gear." That's the trouble: The dead can return, but they can't stay. On earth, they're as out of their element as the shirt in the title poem of Valentine's 13th collection. It's a book of elegies not for the departed but for the changed, full of ghosts having trouble breathing, speaking or otherwise adapting to our strange customs: "Greatgrandmother, my mother says,/Come for a walk./Cán the dead walk? she asks." By the way, that accent over "Cán" is the only one in the book. Valentine doesn't use diacritical marks systematically, as Hopkins or Berryman did; she just wanted one there. She's a fiercely peculiar poet who knows the necessary word when she sees it, regardless of precedent. "There's nothing when you're young and clare/but love," she writes, reincarnating a great English poet as an adjective. Valentine has been at it for more than half a century, during which she has exchanged longer lines and descriptive flourishes for a spare, fragmentary style. Her writing is often lucid and sometimes lovely, but feels no obligation to be either. Every syllable sounds like a small, difficult victory over silence: "My words to you are the stitches in a scarf/I don't want to finish."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 27, 2015]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
"I'm, you know, still here,/ tulip, resin, temporary," Valentine (Break the Glass) declares in a supple new collection of poems that maneuver the dark recesses of consciousness and hum with unearthly energy. The octogenarian former New York State Poet Laureate, winner of the 1965 Yale Younger Poets Prize and 2004 National Book Award for poetry, folds time, summons lost friends in dreams, and conjures lines that are slippery, airy, and thoroughly heartrending. Broken into four parts, the poems of this book move roughly chronologically: the first section, "Luna Moth," reaches back to her youth and poetic influences; the second section, "Friend," explores loss: "I wore his hat/ as if it was the rumpled coat/ of his body, like I could put it on.// The coat of his hair, of his brain, its glitter/ he gave it to me, something he'd worn." The last two sections open wide to perspectives on craft, artwork, and memory. Valentine sees poetry as a kind of erratic teleportation, a door or window leading into the unknown: "that time in that half-underwater cave/ when you dove and came up someplace else,/ and called to me, Come on." Though Valentine may think she has merely given readers "some bad, worn memories," she has really given us armfuls of gifts. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
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