‘Little Boat’ Sails Smoothly Over Rough Waters

Though Jean Valentine ’56 steers through dark waters in “Little Boat,” she crafts a peaceful and inspiring collection of poems. Through a light, spiritual, and dream-like exploration of an eclectic mix of heavy, melancholic issues—including confinement, illness, death, and grief—the National Book Award winner rattles her readers’ emotions, but manages to bring them safely into harbor. Despite the seemingly jumbled writing style and lack of a specific pattern to the book, Valentine creates a truly unique meditation on dark subject matter made bright.

Valentine captivates the reader on a number of different levels, creating a poetic collage with a chaos of words and scattered syntax and punctuation. Although a bit difficult to follow at first, the inconsistent punctuation and spacing that characterizes Valentine’s writing ultimately proves to be one of the book’s prime pleasures. Many of the poems found within “Little Boat” end with an elongated dash or no punctuation at all, which allows the reader to drift onto the next piece.

Indeed, many of Valentine’s poems seem to be incomplete fragments of something larger. In poems such as “But your touch” and “Gray,” Valentine begins in what appears to be the middle of a larger monologue, sparking the reader’s imagination and forcing her to actively engage with the poem and consider the context out of which it grows. This fragmentation combines with Valentine’s use of internal monologue to lend the collection a dream-like tone.

In these fragmented dreams, the disturbing becomes beautiful. In “The Artist in Prison,” Valentine delicately describes a prisoner with a life sentence, trading simple things such as cigarettes “for socks / for their threads...to embroider little / pictures” for someone else.

This single action simply reveals the beauty of life. Even in oppressive, seemingly eternal captivity, a muted contentment prevails. Through enjambment and strategic placement of dashes, the poem suggests that it might be read as a series of questions or statements—possibly between multiple speakers—introducing an element of interpretative ambiguity to Valentine’s portrait of desperation.

Each of Valentine’s six sections explores a different manifestation of the theme of beauty in darkness. In the third part, “Strange Lights,” Valentine presents a series of poems written from the viewpoint of a patient in a hospital. The dire circumstance is made peaceful by gentle, imaginative language. For example, in “Hopsital: far from home,” phrases such as “cinnamon slipper” and “winter fields like covers” give the poem a warm and dreamy tone, which allows the reader to feel at peace despite the subject matter.

Each poem in the fourth section, “From the Questions of Bhanu Kapil,” takes its title from a question from Bhanu Kapil Rider’s “The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers,” expanding the notion that “Little Boat” is simply a collage of thoughts.

In the second section, “Jesus Said,” and the concluding section, “Maria Gravida, Mary Expectant,” Valentine turns to the spiritual. In “Maria Gravida,” words such as death, salvation, and immortality, along with phrases such “souls around the cross” and “it was death in life” explore Christian issues. In this poem, Valentine positions the speaker as Mary’s baby, writing, “She tickled me & told me I was beautiful / She held me in the ikon & we gazed.” These peaceful lines allow the reader to comfortably ponder whether or not Valentine is positioning her speaker as Jesus while characterizing Christianity as warm and maternal.

Similarly, in spiritual poems like “Death Poem,” “The Afterlife Poem” and “To my soul (2),” the heavy issues of death and the afterlife are made simple and casual. In “To my soul (2),” Valentine addresses her soul and simply ponders whether or not she will miss it in the next life. Beautifully ending the poem with a comparison of the relationship she once had with her soul to the ordinary but poetic—“coffee grains / brushed across paper . . .”—Valentine leaves the reader floating on her words.

Death, the afterlife, and desperation may be dark and weighty issues, but in Valentine’s light and glittering poems they glisten.