Next to where their ship went downthey pitched their linen tents.You, mountain-climbing,mountain-climbing,wearing your dead father’s flight jacket—My scalp is alive,love touched it. My eyes are open water. Yours too.Sitting in the dark Baltimore bardrinking Cokewith you with your inoperable cancerwith your medsno tentno care what we look likewhat we sayLater that night, in my roomlooking into the mirror, to tell the truth I was loved.I looked right through into nothing.
[The ship] is slowly giving up her sentient life. I cannot write about it.
Jean Valentine
Shackleton, diary
Feature Date
- August 20, 2023
Series
Selected By
Share This Poem
Print This Poem
“[The ship] is slowly giving up her sentient life. I cannot write about it.” from SHIRT IN HEAVEN: by Jean Valentine.
Published by Copper Canyon Press in 2015.
Copyright © 2015 by Jean Valentine.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Jean Valentine was born in Chicago, earned her BA from Radcliffe College, and has lived most of her life in New York City. She won the Yale Younger Poets Prize for her first book, Dream Barker, in 1965. Her collection Door in the Mountain won the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry. She has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bunting Institute, the Rockefeller Foundation, the New York Council for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as the Maurice Prize, the Teasdale Poetry Prize, The Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Prize, and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Port Townsend, Washington
"Copper Canyon Press may be a little nonprofit publisher far from New York, but over the last 50 years, its editors in Port Townsend, Wash., have shaped and elevated American poetry. This month, in honor of its golden anniversary, Copper Canyon is releasing a truly essential anthology titled A House Called Tomorrow. . . . Relying on recommendations from poets, press board members and current and former colleagues, editor Michael Wiegers has selected poems from hundreds of collections published by Copper Canyon over the years. You’ll find here work by Pablo Neruda, Lucille Clifton, W.S. Merwin, Arthur Sze, Dana Levin, C.D. Wright, Ted Kooser, Brenda Shaughnessy, Gregory Orr, Chris Abani, Matthew Zapruder, Natalie Diaz, Kwame Dawes, Roger Reeves—on and on, a fount of poetic genius, all elegantly laid out in a large-format paperback book."
—Ron Charles, Washington Post
"Since 1973, the publisher Copper Canyon has provided a haven for poets and readers. This retrospective includes work from Pablo Neruda, Lucille Clifton and hundreds more."
—New York Times
"A sweeping new selection of poems from the press’s fifty-year history. The collection includes beloved poems from books spanning half a century, representing Pulitzer Prize-winners, debut collections, works in translation, and rare titles from Copper Canyon’s early days."
—Elisa Gabbert, The Rumpus
Poetry Daily Depends on You
With your support, we make reading the best contemporary poetry a treasured daily experience. Consider a contribution today.
