Door In The Mountain New And Collected Poems 1965 2003

This National Book Award–winning volume presents nearly forty years of the renowned poet’s work. Between 1965 and 2003, Jean Valentine published nine critically acclaimed collections of poetry, including Dream Barker(winner of the Yale Younger Poets Award), Ordinary Things, and The River at Wolf. Spare and intensely-felt, Valentine’s poems present experience as only imperfectly graspable. This volume gathers together all of Valentine's published poems, presenting them alongside a stunning new collection. Valentine’s poetry is as recognizable as the slant truth of a dream. She is a brave, unshirking poet who speaks with fire on the great subjects―love, and death, and the soul. Her images―strange, canny visions of the unknown self―clang with the authenticity of real experience. This is an urgent art that wants to heal what it touches, a poetry that wants to tell, intimately, the whole life.

"As elliptical and demanding as Emily Dickinson, Valentine consistently rewards the reader."—Library Journal In her eleventh collection—honored as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry—Jean Valentine characteristically weds a moral imperative to imaginative and linguistic leaps and bounds. Whether writing elegies, meditations on aging, or an extended homage to Lucy, the earliest known hominid, the pared-down compactness of her tone and vision reveals a singular voice in American poetry. As Adrienne Rich has said of Valentine's work, "This is a poetry of the highest order, because it lets us into spaces and meanings we couldn't approach in any other way." From "If a Person Visits Someone in a Dream, in Some Cultures the Dreamer Thanks Them": At a hotel in another star. The rooms were cold and damp, we were both at the desk at midnight asking if they had any heaters. They had one heater. You are ill, please you take it. Thank you for visiting my dream. * Can you breathe all right? Break the glass shout break the glass force the room break the thread Open the music behind the glass . . . Jean Valentine, a former State Poet of New York, earned a National Book Award, the Wallace Stevens Award, and the Shelley Memorial Prize. She has taught at Sarah Lawrence, New York University, and Columbia University. She lives in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of New York City.

"Jean Valentine has a gift for tough strangeness, but also a dreamlike syntax and manner of arranging the lines of . . . short poems so as to draw us into the doubleness and fluency of feelings."—The New York Times Book Review Quietly marked by elegy and memory, National Book Award winner Jean Valentine's thirteenth book is empowered by her signature clear music and compassion. Valentine leads us chronologically from childhood drawings and wartime memories to the present, where she addresses aging and the loss of loved ones. These poems of tender grace reflect on the small histories few ever fully see. Shirt in Heaven Come upon a snapshot of secret you, smiling like FDR, leaning on your crutches— come upon letters I thought I'd burned— I suppose you've got a place with lots of stairs. I'm at the end of something, you're at the beginning . . . —dearest, they told me a surgeon sat down in the hospital morgue, next to your body, & cried. He yelled at the aide to get out. His two sons had been your students. —me too, little-knowing— Jean Valentine is the current State Poet of New York and author of twelve books of poetry, including Door in the Mountain, which won the National Book Award. She has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, New York University, and Columbia University, and lives in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of New York City.

"Jean Valentine has written a visionary book. If it is built with the brick and wood of this world, the light that pours through its windows is searing, healing."—Marie Howe

To honor FSG's 75th anniversary, here is a unique anthology celebrating the riches and variety of its poetry list—past, present, and future Poetry has been at the heart of Farrar, Straus and Giroux's identity ever since Robert Giroux joined the fledgling company in the mid-1950s, soon bringing T. S. Eliot, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, and Elizabeth Bishop onto the list. These extraordinary poets and their successors have been essential in helping define FSG as a publishing house with a unique place in American letters. The FSG Poetry Anthology includes work by almost all of the more than one hundred twenty-five poets whom FSG has published in its seventy-five-year history. Giroux's first generation was augmented by a group of international figures (and Nobel laureates), including Pablo Neruda, Nelly Sachs, Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, and Joseph Brodsky. Over time the list expanded to includes poets as diverse as Yehuda Amichai, John Ashbery, Frank Bidart, Louise Glück, Thom Gunn, Ted Hughes, Yusef Komunyakaa, Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, Paul Muldoon, Les Murray, Grace Paley, Carl Phillips, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, James Schuyler, C. K. Williams, Charles Wright, James Wright, and Adam Zagajewski. Today, Henri Cole, francine j. harris, Ishion Hutchinson, Maureen N. McLane, Ange Mlinko, Valzhyna Mort, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, and Frederick Seidel are among the poets who are continuing FSG's tradition as a discoverer and promoter of the most vital and distinguished contemporary voices. This anthology is a wide-ranging showcase of some of the best poems published in America over the past three generations. It is also a sounding of poetry's present and future.

The Anglia Book Series (ANGB) offers a selection of high quality work on all areas and aspects of English philology. It publishes book-length studies and essay collections on English language and linguistics, on English and American literature and culture from the Middle Ages to the present, on the new English literatures, as well as on general and comparative literary studies, including aspects of cultural and literary theory.

American Poetry Now is a comprehensive collection of the best work from the renowned Pitt Poetry Series. Since its inception in 1967, the series has been a vehicle for America's finest contemporary poets. The series list includes Poet Laureate Billy Collins, Toi Derricotte, Denise Duhamel, Lynn Emanuel, Bob Hicok, Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Ted Kooser, Larry Levis, Sharon Olds, Alicia Suskin Ostriker, Virgil Suárez, Afaa Michael Weaver, David Wojahn, Dean Young, and many others. Throughout its forty-year history, the Pitt Poetry Series has provided a voice for the diversity that is American poetry, representing poets from many backgrounds without allegiance to any one school or style. American Poetry Now is a true representation of contemporary American poetry. Ed Ochester, series editor for nearly thirty years, has assembled a quintessential selection-along with biographies and photos, an enlightening introduction, and a suggested list for further reading, all in a highly accessible format. American Poetry Now is a sweeping anthology that will delight poetry fans, students, teachers, and general readers alike.