WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: May 29, 2024

Light Me Down: The New & Collected Poems of Jean Valentine (Alice James, 2024) is a gorgeously produced volume worthy of a major American poet. In her foreword, Anne Marie Macari aptly and elegantly describes Jean as a “once-in-generation poet of the interior life.” Light Me Down gathers all of Jean’s books as well as series of stunning “new” poems written in the last four years of her life, from 2016-2020. The titular poem is the first poem in the collection—

Light me down to the long meadow
to where the new snow taps on the fallen snow
with the fingers of the lost tribe.

Who would want us to listen?
Someone does want it:

          Mother of snow
smoking your cigarette ration, your dark
lipstick mouthprint hungry

for the frail paper,
long after the war was over.

While Jean was indeed a poet of interiority, she was also keenly engaged with the world—wars, family life, poverty, injustice. Her daring and mysterious verse, rooted in time but yet timeless, wants us to listen.

 

Comments

[jim c]

immediately ordered it. Thanks, Denise.

[Judy Ireland]

Thank you, Denise, for this wonderful review and recommendation!