Valentine, Jean

Valentine, Jean( 1934– ),
born in Chicago and educated at Radcliffe, had her first collection of verse published in the Yale Younger Poets Series: Dream Barker and Other Poems (1965). The title poem is a vivid and haunting dream wherein the narrator and “a Virgilian Nigger Jim” go in his flat-bottomed boat to a joyous “seafood barker's cave,” but the speaker at last wakes “Bone dry, old, in a dry land, Jim, my Jim.” Poems from Pilgrims (1969), Ordinary Things (1974), and The Messenger (1979) are reprinted in Deep Blue, New and Selected Poems (1989).