WW Norton & Company, Alice James Books
WW Norton & Company, Alice James Books
With National Poetry Month comes spring flowers and some of the biggest poetry releases of the year. And as April comes to a close, we wanted to introduce you to two of our favorites: retrospective collections from two of the finest poets of the late 20th and early 21st centuries: Marie Howe and Jean Valentine.
How New and selected poems presents a concise argument for Howe’s status as an essential poet. The new and collected poems of Jean Valentine brings together the entire work of the late beloved poet, a monument to a treasured career.
New and selected poems by Marie Howe
Marie Howe writes some of the most devastating and true poems of her career – and some of the best written by anyone. Its subject, seen as a whole, is simply the big questions and their unanswers: why are we here? What does it mean to do good? What have we done to the environment? What are the consequences and what do we who are here owe to those who will follow us? And yet, his tone and direct delivery make his poems as accessible as friends. Howe is the rare poet whose poems one wants to hug for company, camaraderie, and empathy; and yet they are literary works of the highest order, layered, full of traps, shoots and ladders that suddenly transport you between the words. It is a tough love that these poems propose, but it is undeniably love.
This first retrospective brings together a book’s worth of new poems as well as numerous selections from Howe’s four previous collections, each of which was a milestone upon its publication. Perhaps her closest antecedent was Elizabeth Bishop, who also didn’t write much or publish much, but everything she wrote was good, even Capitol-G-Great. Howe is best known for What do the living do? (1997), which remains one of the great books about youth and heartbreak, regret and moving forward if not moving forward. It is a world in which “everything I ever tried to hold on to by force, I have lost.” Surprising, almost koan-like statements like this one spring from unassuming domestic scenes, turning everyday life into drama.
The typical speaker of a Howe poem is a woman who closely resembles Mary Howe, even when she speaks through the voice of the biblical Mary, as she does in Madeleine (2017): “I was pushed towards desire by desire. » She is serious except when she is funny, although she rarely laughs out loud in a funny way – it is more of a kind of inner laughter, like a light blooming or a rustling of paper in the chest. She is consoling, except when she takes on herself and her readers, bowing to the simple, Herculean responsibilities that come with living a life, with being a parent. She is tough, sometimes even stoic, except that in almost every poem there is a moment of surprise, a revelation, a piercing insight that injects a kind of pure ecstasy.
Some of the new poems are among the best Howe wrote, making this one of the best periods. Set “In the middle of my life – just past the middle,” these poems mourn lost friends; reckon with a girl’s sudden adulthood; deplore the destruction of the environment; and take the moral measure of this very worrying time. Each of these daily dramas becomes an access point to the deepest human reconciliation, where we must finally admit where language fails us. These poems also feature a recurring character, “our little dog Jack,” who, with all the best intentions in the world, becomes one of Howe’s most devastating metaphors. But all metaphors find their origin in concrete facts. As Howe writes in “Reincarnation,” one of his best poems, “Jack may actually be himself: a dog.”
Light Me Down: The New and Collected Poems of Jean Valentine
It is one of those monumental events in American poetry: the life work of a major poet brought together in a great book, an opportunity to revel in all that Jean Valentine accomplished during his long and prolific career. As a young poet, Valentine (1934-2020) won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize in 1965, for his first collection, Dream Barker. In 2004, she won the National Book Award for Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965-2003. Between then and after, she was always highly regarded by the mainstream poetic establishment, winning most of the prizes given to an American poet.
But Valentine’s real influence lay as a friendly ambassador to and from the avant-garde. It is difficult to pin down Valentine’s poems: I would not call them experimental, but they are anything but simple in their slippages of thought and their broad leaps of association. Quite early in his career, Valentine began working in a style that had him teasing the reader with images, gently suggesting the direction the poem should take, until, perhaps, a clap of thunder at the ending disrupts the calm. She always knows where to end. Pick almost any poem and the last two lines will shock you with their improbable and inevitable nature.
Valentine writes about everything – love, death, sex, the turbulent political situations of the last half century – with both candor and mystery: “I have been so far, so deep, so cold, so much” , she says prophetically in a first poem. She asserts that poetry can be created almost entirely by suggestion, that the poet must trust in the secret connections between one word and another, and trust that the reader will be willing to travel with the poet along these subterranean currents. In a short poem, a 1992 haiku, “In Memory of David Kalstone,” dedicated to the literary critic who died in 1986, Valentine offers as succinct a statement of his poetics as one could wish for: “This is the letter I I wrote,/ and the ghost letter, underneath –/ it’s my life’s work. Valentine’s poem draws our attention to the words beneath the words, to what is said between them, in all the white space that surrounds the poems.
Elsewhere Valentine opts for simple observations, imbued with a bit of mystery, as in the brief elegy “Rodney Dying (3)”:
“I vacuumed your room
a gray sock
I was sucked in, it was gone
sock you wore on your warm foot,
I walked, I turned around,
I returned
also, take off your shoes and heavy socks
and I swam”
There are no sudden flashes of depth here, nothing, really, that one might call insight, at least not overtly. Instead, Valentine asks an object, the sock, to carry the sorrow. This is a technique that poets call the “objective correlative”: it is an image that represents an emotion or a knot of emotions. This unpretentious object, or rather just the word to designate it — sock – becomes a container, a sort of canopic to contain the sorrow, but also to let it vibrate a little. The poem ends with what could be an allegory of death, but it is also a celebration of Rodney’s vitality. The language is as simple as possible, and yet I come away from the poem with an uncertainty, both hopeful and despairing. Valentine is an expert in the art of pitting these kinds of contradictions against each other. The emotional climate of Valentine’s poems is ambivalent in the best way, informed by contradictory energies.
And while this book is a monumental celebration of an extraordinary legacy, it is also a sad one to remember: Valentine was until so recently an inexhaustible and generous force in American poetry. It seems impossible to accept the fact that she is dead while reading poems so deeply alive.
Craig Morgan Teicher is the author of several books, including The trembling answerswho won the 2018 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and the essay collection We begin with joy: how poets progress.
Entertainment
