Home Deep Blue Book

Eighteen new poems extend the trajectory of Jean Valentine’s work. Included are selections from her four previous books: Dream Barker, Pilgrims, Ordinary Things, and The Messenger. Her themes of pilgrimage, time, and human connection are revealed in intense meditations.

Library Journal

This book, a wise selection from older work and a generous offering of new poems, should win Valentine the audience she deserves. Long admired by poets such as Auden, Bishop, and Lowell, she remains inexplicably neglected. Her poems are a rare pleasure: serious and graceful, never glib, testimony to the strength and beauty of the lyric as a music of words, not ideas. As elliptical and demanding as Emily Dickinson, Valentine consistently rewards the reader: ``The pear tree buds shine like salt;/ the stretch of new-ploughed earth holds up/ five colors of brown to the strict sun--/ like an old woman's open hand, at rest.'' Reading her work aloud, a joy in itself, serves to dispel any obscurity. For anyone interested in lyric poetry.-- Kathleen Norris, Lemmon P.L., S.D.