Light Me Down: The New & Collected Poems of Jean Valentine - (Hardcover)

About the Book

"In these last prayerful poems by Jean Valentine, the poet visits loss, death, and transitional states. Full of longing, connections, and intergenerational knowledge, Valentine continues the mystical journey that has carried her through a lifetime devoted to poetry. Spirits connect. Guides are everywhere as she is "leaving all worlds behind." Love doesn't disappear but is steadfast and without boundaries. A poet of deep tenderness for everything living, from a dying cricket to her living and lost friends, Valentine is full of gratitude for this world, writing: "This is happiness. Old life,/ I'm glad, all my rubbed life/ I was found,/ I was written on a wall in air." The reader too is full of gratitude for these moving last missives from a great poet"

Book Synopsis

Multi-award winner, including a National Book Award, Jean Valentine published twelve full-length collections of poetry during her lifetime, and all of them--plus an entirely new, unpublished manuscript--can be found in this masterful collection of her life's work.

The new poems acknowledge the inevitability of death while tenderly musing on what remains from a world left behind. The poems have an intricate balance between the sadness of a life lived and illuminating how the remaining love is steadfast, irreversible, and abiding even as we transcend from this earth.

In her later years, Jean would write poems on napkins, random scraps of paper, and even on a typewriter, and those close to her would collect these writings and transcribe them into a Word document so they wouldn't be lost. Even Jean's therapist transcribed a poem that she spoke in one of their sessions--a poem that can be found in this new work. Jean was always writing poetry wherever inspiration struck her, even through the struggle of her declining health. It was Jean's wish that her work landed back at her first home, Alice James Books--back to her origin point as a writer, coming full circle.

In these last prayerful poems, the poet visits loss, death, and transitional states. Full of longing, connections, and intergenerational knowledge, Valentine continues the mystical journey that has carried her through a lifetime devoted to poetry. Spirits connect. Guides are everywhere as she is "leaving all worlds behind." Love doesn't disappear but is steadfast and without boundaries. A poet of deep tenderness for everything living, from a dying cricket to her living and lost friends, Valentine is full of gratitude for this world, writing: "This is happiness. Old life, / I'm glad, all my rubbed life/ I was found, / I was written on a wall in air." The reader too is full of gratitude for these moving last missives from a great poet.

Ada Limon states, "The extraordinary poems of Jean Valentine have often existed in the between spaces, the caves, the secret rooms of the mind. They are gorgeous wonders and curiosities that bring us a new kind of light. The Collected Poems of Jean Valentine will no doubt serve as an essential handbook for anyone looking to lean into the knotty questions of human existence."

Review Quotes

"A new retrospective of her work, Light Me Down, out this week from Maine-based press Alice James Books, showcases Valentine's ability to charge between the dreamy and unalloyed precision. ... These are poems of snow, of the quiet, profound transformation, of moments of altering nothingness in the night. Valentine, who died in 2020, does with language what poetry is meant to do with language, which is to go beyond it."
--Nina MacLaughlin, The Boston Globe

"[Valentine] asserts that poetry can be made almost entirely through suggestion, that the poet must trust the secret links between one word and another, and trust that the reader will be willing to travel with the poet along those underground currents. ... Valentine was an inexhaustible and generous force in American poetry until so recently. It feels impossible to accept the fact that she is dead while reading poems that are so profoundly alive."
--Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR

"According to Macari's introduction, near the end of her life, Jean would edit her own poems, and then ask, "Did I write that?" She was never the authority of her poems. Rather, the existence of poetry was her greatest source of vitality. While we can usually assume that the voice goes out with the body, after reading Light Me Down, I can say with nervy, embodied delight, 'I don't know.'"
--Elizabeth Metzger, Los Angeles Review of Books

"This resonant and comprehensive retrospective of Valentine (Shirt in Heaven), who died in 2020, celebrates the poet's visceral, spiritual, and uncanny writing."
--Publishers Weekly Starred Review

"In her lucid, haunting style, Jean Valentine chronicles life's delicate break ups. Her Collected Poems is a testament of intense devotion to fill the mundanity of loss with a secret light. Poetry nourishes her, at times poetry eats her: she sees through poetry, thinks through poetry; from the snows of her, poetry digs itself out from the depth of her. You are holding a treasure chest of elegies, lullabies, prayers, letters, and dreams, spoken to lovers, parents, children, and poets, from rooms full of snow, from doorways, and deathbeds. Respectfully, intimately, and desperately, year after year, Jean Valentine is turning everything that is not language into language. 'Ah Jeanie, ' a dead father says to the poet, 'you're still in words.' Light Me Down: The New & Collected Poems of Jean Valentine is a life-long letter, written with the blood of language, affirming her father's claim. Jean Valentine is forever in words."
--Valzhyna Mort, author of Music for the Dead and Resurrected

"Stunningly, each page of The New & Collected Poems of Jean Valentine is lit and alive with the poet's violet, inner sight. In a language both crystalline and porous, hers is a poetics of attunement. Line after line of mind and earth-record shaped into breath, taught by the snow, the dead, the grasses, the dreaming. Toward all that is more-than-language, she seems to unlatch the gate inside each word so that such energy might again belong to a ceaseless becoming. Radiance or starlight of breath or all. I know I am not alone when I say Jean Valentine is a genius of my heart. With Quietness, expressivity, and devotion, her work burns shoulder to shoulder with the candles. I press this text to my chest knowing it is a sacred trace of one of our most exquisite practitioners. Gone into the mysteries, and yet not gone--"
--Aracelis Girmay

About the Author

Jean Valentine was born in Chicago, earned her B.A. from Radcliffe College, and lived most of her life in New York City. She won the Yale Younger Poets Award for her first book, Dream Barker, in 1965. Her 13th book of poetry was Shirt in Heaven, published by Copper Canyon Press in 2015. Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965 - 2003 won the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry. Jean was the State Poet of New York for two years, starting in the spring of 2008. She received the 2009 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, and also received a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the NEA, The Bunting Institute, The Rockefeller Foundation, The New York Council for the Arts, and The New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as the Maurice English Prize, the Teasdale Poetry Prize, and The Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Prize in 2000. In 2014 she was given an award for exceptional accomplishment in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She was awarded Yale University's Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 2017. She taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the Graduate Writing Program of New York University, Columbia University, and the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan. Jean Valentine died on December 29, 2020, in New York, NY. She was 86.