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17 August 2017

Poetry Thursday - inkwell Daybreak by Jean Valentine

Drawing by Vija Celmins (via)

Inkwell    daybreak

Inkwell          daybreak

stairway
                       stairway


Dear girls and boys,
would you go with me and tell me
back to the beginning
--so we can understand!
the journey of our lives
where we met with cruelty
but kindness, too,
and nosed up out
of the cold dark water,
and walked on our fins...


I heard this on the Poetry Foundation's Poem of the Day podcast - listen to it online here, or - along with many other of her poems - on her own website.

Jean Valentine was born in Chicago in 1934 and published her first book of poems in 1965; it won the Yale Younger Poets award, and another dozen books have followed. "Her lyric poems" says the Poetry Foundation site,
 delve into dream lives with glimpses of the personal and political. In the New York Times Book Review, David Kalstone said of her work, “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.”

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