Douglas Valentine
Author, Investigator, Journalist, Poet
Photograph by Bruce Caress
seaside road in Donegal
Alice at Finn Cool stones
me standing on the Cross of MacDuff in Fifeshire
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Inuit art
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With Sue in Stockbridge
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A Crow's Dream
The poems in Doug Valentine's book, "A Crow's Dream" are meticulously and carefully crafted. Many are tender meditations, deeply centered in Nature. Others contain striking juxtapositions and thought-provoking metaphors, like the three baby snakes who appear in the grass on Easter Sunday morning. There is even an imaginative personification of Talent as a beautiful, demanding and fickle girl. Valentine has an acute sense of what is true; it ranges from the innocent to the mundane to the decadent. Especially rich are his vivid observations of people, from the swaggering Cadillac Jack, to the twirling girl in Shadow Land and the boy who is watching her, to the lost and struggling Marvis Flynn, who "wraps the pieces of himself in a blanket"." Great poetry is something that you can never tire of reading; some mysterious quality enters your eyes and ears; there's something that you never want to stop looking at, like if you had a Gaugin painting on the wall of your tenement room. Great poetry puts you in a trance, even when it describes complete horror, like in some of Neruda, you are dazzled by the beauty of the language.
"A Crow's Dream" is great poetry-- any lover of language and its music just knows it when they see it. Here, listen: faces in the stream among passing clouds have never been so near or so far: the look in their eyes is lost in the time it takes to give a name. I could say that over and over again forever. I could learn everything there is to know about life with those few words. There is a great range of feeling and emotion in this collection of poems: vast spiritual meditations like "faces in the stream" to a child's instinctive disgust at false, boring adult rituals and empty beliefs, like "Memorial Day." I will take these poems with me wherever I go. The Hand Is faster Than The Eye
A Poem From My Book Posted at Jeff Kaye's Blog Invictus I like writing four-line poems I call quatrains. Below is a sampling: Dancing Flames Dancing flames curl the paper edges of sky Silver and turquoise tinsel sketch the air Like scars upon the universal eye From viewing beauty everywhere. ___________________________ Dream Feelings Dream feelings vague at the city gate Cloaked in alien garb absurdly congregate And with incoherent shouts in costumes leap Upon the amorphous landscapes of sleep. _____________________________ As Never Before We step, we hope, in harmony Across a moonlit checkered floor Beneath red lanterns on a string In love again, as never before. _____________________________ Ephemeral Glow Your ephemeral glow Your refined sense of reserve Your shimmers in the darkness Get on my last nerve. ___________________________ The Shape I’m In Sometimes I feel fat Sometimes thin - It’s a comment about The shape I’m in. ____________________________ Palestinian Pop tactical nuclear Israeli rock that's the beat he walk terrorized round the clock, like a bomb, tick tock that's the rap he talk. __________________________ Chinese Take Out The colonialists had it right Mao is graffiti on the Great Wall Greed and the Internet will shatter China Into a thousand tinkling Tibets. __________________________ Cuban Cigars and Russian Caviar Cuban cigars and Russian caviar: The foundations of capitalism. Napoleon brandy, a guillotine handy: The tools of radical revision. ______________________________ More or Less More or less having is only half; Often one must stifle a laugh. The charm is of this sense and type, Working only when the time is right. ______________________________ Wash and Dry You always say that fair is fair: You’re gonna wash, I’m gonna dry. So how come I make you laugh, And you make me cry and cry? _____________________________ Phases of the Moon The getting done of this thing Is planting a garden in spring: Learning the words to the sparrow’s tune, Following the phases of the moon. ________________________________ Presenting Things Presenting things we knew, but forgot, Fishing now in a shallow stream, The speckled trout slip through my net – And for once the image is free. |
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