VALENTINE, Jean

Born 27 April 1934, Chicago, Illinois

Daughter of John and Jean Purcell Valentine; married James Chace, 1957 (divorced); Barrie Cooke, 1991; children: Sarah, Rebecca

Jean Valentine is a graduate of Radcliffe College (B.A.1956). Her first book of poetry, Dream Barker and Other Poems (1965) was chosen by Dudley Fitts and published as the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. She has taught at Yale, Barnard, Swarthmore, and Hunter Colleges, among others, and since 1974 has been on the faculty of Sarah Lawrence College.

Though over the years Valentine has not had the recognition accorded many of her contemporaries, she is considered by many to be among the finest American poets. Hayden Carruth has commented: "No other living poet gives me as keen a sense of intelligence, the mind at work there on the page, as [Valentine's]…. Such poems are very, very rare." Valentine has received awards from many foundations and organizations including the National Endowment for the Arts (1972), New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council for the Arts, The Bunting Institute, and the Rockefeller Foundation. She was also the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship in 1976, and was awarded the Maurice English Prize in 1991 and the Sara Teasdale Poetry Prize in 1992.

Her poetry makes of experience something spare and emblematic, dream-like. Her lines rely on image, and often time and objects become a haunting presence in her poems. She investigates what Richard Jackson calls the "hallowing of the everyday," using language to go places it seems most difficult or perhaps useless to go, to describe the moment things invisible become visible.

Valentine's early poems are more formal and explore language and images; she often alludes to classical and biblical narratives which give these poems a sense of depth and context, as seen in a few lines from "Waiting": You will not be forgiven if you ignore / The pillar of slow insistent snow / Framing the angel at the door / Who will not speak and will not go." Many of her poems range through the varied experiences of women's lives: first love, marriage, childbirth, family life. She often uses dialogue in a symbolic manner where voices in poems speak in associative rather than linear ways. And, as in "September 1963," people populate her poems much in the way they populate dreams, as figures floating between language: "With twenty other Gullivers / I hover at the door, / Watch you shy through this riddle of primary colors, / The howling razzle-dazzle of your peers."

In Valentine's subsequent volumes, her poems become more delineated and definite in the world they evoke. Wider political and social forces appear in tangible ways. And though Valentine's poems are perhaps less specifically concerned with her own private life, the experiences of others are still grounded in the physicality of life lived in bodies. This does not mean Valentine leaves the personal behind, she has just found a way to widen what is personal into ever overlapping circles which vibrate out from images in her poems: "Today we visited a field of graves—/ slaves' or Indians' graves, you said—/ sunk, unmarked, green edges of hammered granite / sharp as a shoulder blade" ("Forces" Home. Deep. Blue., 1989).

In her most recent book, Growing Darkness, Growing Light (1997), Valentine's poems are pared down and deal deeply with the presence of death and the spiritual. These are often evoked by the simplest of things as in "A Bit of Rice": "A bit of rice in a string bag: / the rice spills, / we have to sweep it up… / What will be left here when you die? / Not the rice / not the tea / left somewhere when the monk / knocked over the cup / not / not." As Alberta Turner comments, all of [Valentine's] poems, in one way or another, address "the threat of an empty universe." Valentine also returns to the world of women with a small series of poems (beginning with "Mother and Child, Body and Soul") which explore the often painful and deeply knotted relationships between mother and daughter.

Valentine's poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Atlantic Monthly, Field, Ironwood, New Yorker, Ploughshares, Poetry Ireland Review, Salt Hill Journal, and many other journals and anthologies. Valentine currently lives in New York City, but spends part of her time in County Sligo, Ireland. Her newest book of poems The Cradle of Real Life is forthcoming in 2000.