Jean Valentine’s Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965-2003 received the National Book Award in 2004. Eight previous collections have been just as well received and widely recognized for the intensity of their spirit—a Jean Valentine poem faces the broken world without fear and not without hope. So it is with much enthusiasm that I shine the spotlight on the most recent book by one of the most beloved poets of our times:
The Eleventh Brother (2)
The car you were driving
flew off the bridge, it was drowning.
This was after The Wild Swans–
the story where even though you were her favorite
your sister couldn’t finish weaving your shirt,
so when you turned back
to a man, one arm stayed a swan’s wing.
The car you were driving
flew off the bridge, it was drowning.
This was after The Wild Swans,
your sister had finished weaving your other arm,
she dove down to give it to you
through the gray water. You couldn’t
take it. You wouldn’t.
The direct reference here is to the 1838 fairytale by Hans Christian Andersen, about a young princess who must reunite her family after her brothers are placed under an evil spell by their wicked stepmother. They have been turned into swans, and Elise must weave eleven coats to clothe her brothers and change them back into princes before time runs out—she’s been accused of witchery and sentenced to burn at the stake. She saves the day at the nick of time, but only one sleeve is left unfinished, which means that despite the successful shattering of the spell, the eleventh brother is left with a wing instead of an arm.
But this poem is not simply about the fairytale, of course, but about the devastation of loss, about the frightening reality that not every sister can save the day, and not every brother can live through the tragedy. In this particular poem, there is also a slight question about choice (“You couldn’t/ take it. You wouldn’t.”) as in: Was this dive off the bridge an accident or a suicide? In any case, the loss is definite.
Any 14-line poem always signals the presence of a sonnet for me. And though there is that rhyming couplet at the end, what’s more apparent in the repetition of the firs 3 lines at the center of the poem so that the poem is actually two movements, two possibilities—two versions of the story, two siblings, two-line stanzas. And since there is no “The Eleventh Brother (1)” in the book, that suspicious (2) in the title informs me that this is no longer a number, but a symbol transformed into—yes—a solitary swan.
Five of the poems in Little Boat are actually sequences, which I didn’t excerpt here because (although each poem can be read independently of the others) I would be disrespecting the integrity of the poet’s project. But I do want to say these are my favorite sections in Valentine’s book. The five-part sequence poem “Maria Gravida, Mary Expectant,” is particularly beautiful with its texture of Catholic imagery and preoccupation with mortality and the cycle of life. The final line, worth mentioning here, closes the conversation with Mary declaring: “come rest again on the country porch of my knees.”
(From Little Boat, published by Wesleyan University Press, 2007.)
I heard Jean Valentine read with Julie Carr a couple of years ago in Colorado. She was fantastic!
Posted By: Sheryl Luna on November 21, 2007 at 4:54 pmReport this comment