Shirt in Heaven
Jean Valentine
Copper Canyon, 2015
Paperback, 80 pp.
$16
Sweet Open Eye to the Wounded
There are thresholds, doors, windows to cross though. In silence and listening, a reaching. The hunger and drive to find a bridge between (father and daughter), between (the living and the newly dead.)
I leapt but couldn’t get to you
Beginning in childhood memory, a father returns, torn apart by war, while a small child also stands torn, by her father’s residing fragility. Jean Valentine’s collection of poems, Shirt in Heaven (Copper Canyon, 2015) opens with a child’s wartime drawing from 1941, a black crayon stroke for the sky, the blackest crayon-canyon, and how to fall, like a child, into it. Father in old pajamas stumbling with a glass of bourbon. Father waving a stick like a pistol, shouting, Man your battle stations, in the family kitchen. He is a kind of ghost, unstitched by the war. The speaker learns from a young age to maneuver in a world of the wounded (sweet open eye to). Following the speaker as she grows older, the poems find her still reaching, attempting to tie connections with her father even after his death, creating a road of imagined dialogue between them. It is the act of language itself that seems to be redemptive, reaching to repair distance when, for so many years, the center of the space felt like cut lines, burned letters, and silence.
When you died, I dreamed
you had fallen asleep on the subway[…]
When I woke up
my clothes were covered with writing,
my hair was sentences, full of twigs,lines ran between my fingers.
Open, Window, Look, it’s
time to fly now.
*
My scalp is alive,/love touched it. My eyes are open water. Yours too.
From a father’s distance in his memory of war, to the harsh brightness of a room before a friend’s death from cancer, separation takes on many forms here. Indicating the intimacy between the speaker and her dying friend, Valentine writes in the poem “Hospice”: I wore his hat/as if it was the rumpled coat/ of his body, like I could put it on./ The coat of his hair, of his brain, its glitter/ he gave it to me, something he’d worn. After his death, she holds the point of grief. It has not yet had the opportunity to ease or soften. Here capturing the hard edges of loss, she is caught in an ultimate present of what can’t be controlled or changed. For a time the speaker resides in a place of expectation: that to turn her head this way, she might glimpse her friend again, and if not, the desire for sleep arises so she can see him alive once more in a dream. Still at present with ghosts.
Isn’t there something in me
like the dogs I’ve heard at home
who bark all night from hunger? Something
in me like trains leaving,isn’t there something in me
like a gun?
*
I in my hunger wrote
There are thresholds, doors, windows to cross though. The hunger and drive to find a bridge where we can reach, be reached. There are lovely, quiet, lonely moments in these poems. The language is simple and direct, surrounded by space, a silent field. There is something of a spotlight effect in the poems, illuminating brightly what is directly in front, while everything outside the frame feels dimmed, intimations of connections cut. With surprising turns in syntax and line breaks, the experience of reading the poems is unexpected, creating an appropriately unsettling, visceral experience. There you have to go back and read the lines again, to un-mine the complexity of what on the surface at first seems so straight forward.
When I lost my courage and my thought
God still sat sewing by the window.
I threw myself to everywhere—
the harbors, everywhere
the poets & painters were.
In this place of bony aloneness that Valentine describes, there is not always a lot of comfort. This is a silence of removal rather than a silence that can feel full. But there is perhaps comfort in this unending desire or hope, which is reaching for connection and safety, warm/ in a safe room ________ all of us/ carried in the close black sky.
Elisabeth Whitehead grew up in the Washington D.C. area and Japan and currently lives in North Carolina. She teaches in the Writing Program at Wake Forest University.