I was carrying a copy of Shirt in Heaven, Jean Valentine’s final collection of poetry, on one of the last evenings I saw her. It was 2017 and she was reading at Yale’s Beinecke Library. She had been awarded the Bollingen Prize for Shirt in Heaven. We, her audience, sat among vitrines displaying rare books and manuscripts as a wan light sifted through thin marble walls, illuminating Jean’s face as she read. Despite the room’s echoes and busy-ness, Jean, as she always could, created a space of intimacy.
Rereading Shirt in Heaven today, I feel a fondness for this book as book. It measures a pleasing 5×7 inches, and the porous cover features a woodcut of a shirt floating in a stratus cloud, a comical form of thought bubble that sidesteps “realistic” for “sincere.” (The image was created by Peter Schumman, founder of the Bread and Puppet Theater.) Shirt in Heaven – no A, no The, no plural. My copy is dogeared, smudged with thumbprints, penciled with exclamations. I don’t know why I didn’t ask her to sign it.
Opening the book, I find a list of Jean’s twelve other collections — a large output despite the famously fallow decade following The Messenger. All of which changed with Home Deep Blue: New and Selected Poems in 1989. A table of contents divides Shirt in Heaven into four sections: Luna Moth; Friend; Threshold; and Then had we well put to, without form, without text (a phrase excerpted from “Plain poetry, a poetry without form, without text, lies beneath written poetry” by Antonin Artaud). These section titles represent one of the pleasures of Jean’s work. It is never driven by plot. It is never informational or didactic. It moves associatively, lyrically, and with an intuitive logic. C. D. Wright put it this way: Valentine “organiz[ed] her emotions, in color terms, by their value – that is, by the darkness staved, the light given off.” (Wright 18)
The first poem in the book is “Luna Moth.”
Luna Moth
at the black window
I hold you in my signal-memory
but I can’t get back to how to talk to you,
silent as the black window.
Silent as your body
little book
on which
I in my hunger wrote.
I imagine that in 2015, when I first read this poem, it was hunger, the desperate longing to break out of silence, that moved me. Today, what resonates is the act of writing. The Luna Moth is a beautiful thing desired and, via inscription, possessed. The “little book” of the moth’s body is reminiscent, for me, of Lucy, the eponymous chapbook Valentine published in 2009 and included in Break the Glass. Lucy is that Lucy, a fossilized skeleton 3.5 feet tall, 3 million years old, and one of our oldest human ancestors. Lucy, she writes,
your secret book
that you leaned over and wrote just in the dirt–
Not having to have an ending
Not having to last …
Your assumes the possession of the book, but as a homonym it makes Lucy a book, her body, her remains, the book written in dirt, archival documents of our shared beginnings.
I have written elsewhere about Lucy and I continue to be haunted by that poem, particularly the section that introduces the drawings of Mexican artist, Martín Ramirez, who, although mute and institutionalized, created beautiful art out of a profound loneliness. Such narratives of isolation and connection infiltrate Valentine’s poems, but the poems never record a specific narrative; rather they are a tracing, a rubbing, a gestural rendering, akin in their imagism, to visual art.
“Why do they call the dead / the never-returners?” Valentine asks in “When I Woke Up, My Friend.” Someone should write an essay on Valentine’s use of hyphens, specifically, the hyphenated compound words that she uses for musical and dialectical effect. Philip Larkin is another master of words yoked together with hyphens. They require enunciation. They have a colloquial, homely sound. They work hard.
In this collection, the dead seem never to be never-returners. They sidle into her dreams, carry vegetables into her kitchen, accost her on the street. Her poetic touchstones appear – Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetaeva, Paul Celan – as well as friends and family members. Sometimes living people appear as ghosts or the poet is herself a ghost: You looked right through me (“Bardo”). Sometimes poetry is the ghost that hovers and disappears, as in “Friend.,” an elegy for Adrienne Rich, (Note the period in the title, the way it end-stops any doubt of the noun’s meaning, its resolution.)
Yesterday, in the afternoon,
more than a year since you died,
some words came into the air.
I looked away a second,
and they were gone –
six lines, just passing through.
Rich described Valentine’s mature work as the place where “the known and familiar become one with the mysterious and half-wild, at the place where consciousness and the subliminal meet.” Pondering that nexus of consciousness and the subliminal, I am reminded of Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight.” A new father sits with his infant son and ruminates on “the stranger” – the alien, the visitor at door, the filmy presence that is a projection of the poet’s dreamy imagination, and the infant itself, a stranger unknowing. In Valentine’s poetry, too, doors open and admit – who? The stranger, Death, is often at the door — but this death is plumbed by life.
We were on the island
of no going beyond.
why do they call the dead
the never-returners?
….
And even here
two days after you died
we talked on W. 17th Street –
Then everything complicated,
swift & gear.
(“When I woke up, my friend”)
Shirt in Heaven creates a “ministry” in which God responds and is responding. And yet, in an era of assured mass destruction, Valentine recognizes the possibility that even God must die.
In the blue-green air and water God
you have come back for us,
to our fiberglass boat.
You have come back for us, & I am afraid.
….
Even when the icebergs are gone, and the millions of suns
have burnt themselves out in your arms,
your arms of burnt air.
(“Icebergs, Ilulissat”)
I remember meeting Jean one day for lunch at her apartment on New York City’s Upper West Side. As she buzzed me in, I heard over the building static-y intercom: “I’ve just woken up. I was having such interesting dreams, I had to let them continue.” At the time, I was a bit shocked that she would sleep until noon. What I understand now, reading Shirt in Heaven in my 60s, is the necessity – the vocation — of seeing into, seeing beyond this world of colors and shapes.
See here. See into the transitory, the train, into the longing, the loss, see into the poetry — “Plain poetry, a poetry without form, without text.”
“Be of-you” — another compound hyphenate that I must ponder, actively, as I try my best, dear Jean, to be “needful.” As I try to maintain a pivotal faith in the possibility of friend.-ship and fellowship. As the poet says:
listen to someone, be of-you
needful to someone
(“God of Rooms”)
/ / / / /
Works Cited
Bland, Celia. “Secret Book Written in the Dirt: Jean Valentine’s Lucy: A Poem” in Jean Valentine: This World Company. Kazim Ali and John Hoppenthaler, eds. Univ. of Michigan, 2012.
Valentine, Jean. Break the Glass. Copper Canyon, 2010 and Shirt in Heaven. Copper Canyon, 2015.
Wright, C.D. The Poet, The Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, A Wedding in St. Roch, The Big Box Store, The Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All. Copper Canyon, 2016.