Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003

Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003 gathers nearly four decades of work by the American poet Jean Valentine in a single volume. It brings together every poem from her earlier collections, beginning with Dream Barker, her 1965 debut, which was chosen for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, and it closes with a new group of poems that gives the book its title. Valentine's poems are short, spare and quietly intense. They move like dreams, often approaching their subjects at an angle and leaving room for silence, and they return again and again to love, grief, death and the inner life of the spirit. Read in sequence, the collection traces how her voice deepened over a long career while keeping its distinctive compression. It is a natural starting point for readers new to her work and a complete record for those who already know it. The book won the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry.