April 2024 saw the arrival of Light Me Down: the New & Collected Poems of Jean Valentine, published by Alice James Books. Call it negative capability or a simple paradox, the enigma at the heart of Valentine’s poetry, the source of the tension and strangeness of these poems spanning her fifty-five year career, is the social interior. This goes beyond looking inward and outward at the same time. The line between the two is often blurred, with neither quite taking the other over. She treats her subjects not as extraction sights from which to siphon beauty or experience, but worthy of attention on their own. Some major subjects she moves between include domestic situations, Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic landscapes, prisons, Eastern and Western mystical traditions, and the fossilized skeleton Lucy. Let’s look at some lines from an early poem, “Sunset at Wellfleet.” It’s a bit of an Ars Poetica from her first collection Dream Barker (1965):

These words I tell you smoking in my eye:
The tree-frog is the tree-frog. The sky is the sky.
The rattling bay runs night and day I, I, I,
Over and over, turning on itself: there,
Where it curls on emptiness: there I sing.
(38)

Here is the slab of rock she would go on to chip at year to year, book to book.  Rhyme gradually fades away. Leaf through these pages and you’ll see lines shorten as white space grows. With this, silence grows, becoming the backdrop in front of which all the poems happen. Nouns, in front of that vastness, while maintaining their unique identities (again, she’s no extractor!) gradually move from functional, physical action, towards the ultimate predicate: to be. Each noun simply seeks to be. Compare “Sunset at Wellfleet” with this late poem, “The Prison”:

The gray slate roof for hair,
the six-eye windows,
red bricks for the body, &
God’s earth & river floor

—the round black window,
where she looked out,
put her hand up to say Stop—
(27)
We see the setting come into existence while Valentine points out where to look. And a bigger shift: no longer are only inanimate things or animals curling on emptiness, now humans do so too.

Largely, the latter poems enact what the earlier ones speak about. They demand slow reading, and that’s a gift. The attention you gather to read them is not hoarded by the poems, but shared. It’s standard praise to say that a poem leads its reader to see the world differently after; these take it a step further and ask you to change your perspective before reading, in this case by slowing down. Maybe this koan-like setup arose out of her Buddhist inclinations.
There are many direct address poems too. These fall somewhere between petition for intercession and séance-style communication. Some are to people living at a distance, and others to the dead. “To My Teacher” figures her (presumed) high school English teacher as a peer of the Beowulf poet:

I talk to you. I can’t hear your words yet,
but your voice like one of the trees
still around your old GI Bill house: Beowulf poet,
do people meet again? In our same old clothes?
or light?
(3)

Here the afterlife is an equalizer as much as death in a Danse Macabre. But instead of the dance happening only between the flesh-and-bone on earth, people across time and worlds lock arms. Only Valentine can see this, but she lets other people in.  The “other” of the other world loses its foreignness; before and after lose their tense and order. The worlds are simply next to each other, exchanging each other’s weight—the Beowulf poet is made as immediate as the teacher in a classroom, the teacher as distant as the person a thousand years ago.
So if the tension in the later poems doesn’t come from an encounter with otherness, where does it originate? Maybe the tension is in the oneness. Not in a threat of coming apart, but the movement from and toward a source. If then and now, as well as this world and the other, are one after all, what do we make of the undeniable difference between light and dark, and the point at which one fades into the other? Valentine's poetry isn't interested in providing a concrete answer. Instead we're invited into instances of these fadings, movements, and tensions occurring.

There’s movement too in that exchange of weight mentioned above. When memory and experience of the present become one, that’s her way into the social interior. Let’s leave off with a line from another late poem, “For Thomas Transtromer & Max Ritvo” The situation seems to come from a letter she once wrote to the Swedish poet. She has him saying “Here, take my hand, we cross here…” (15). More gifts: these words she gives him, and these books for us.