“My head is at your window, Lucy, at your glass,” writes Jean Valentine in her coda apostrophe “Lucy,” the fourth section of her eleventh book of poetry, Break the Glass. Valentine addresses the ultimate figure of beauty (and the universal mother) in the reconstructed display of the first human form. The glass the speaker is “at” is not only the museum casing but a pane separating life and death, in her own words: “when I am close to death and close to life.” With the beautiful insistence of Yeats in “Adam’s Curse” and the enigmatic indirection of Emily Dickinson, Valentine’s address of Lucy functions as a glass, both a window onto and a barrier between what is humanity and what is art.

In this calling back to the first homo sapiens (she even traces the dual etymology of “sapiens” as “sapere, to taste, be wise”), Valentine’s fractured lyricism and elliptical meditations break more than the a social or political “glass ceiling.” Rather, her oscillations between the vulnerability of not being able to express herself exactly, and the joy in expressing nonetheless, speak to the greater power of poetry to create division (she makes ample use of the line break and visual caesura). Perhaps more striking, Valentine’s omissions in syntax and clipped imagery charges whatever is present or verbalized with a window-pane power to draw a reader’s attention to that which lies on the other side, in the silence between and around lines. Silence serves as connective tissue for this shattering lyric voice. The repetition of the title line followed by a space, a pause marked on the page, resonates from a poem written in memory of the poet Reginald Shepherd: “Can you breathe all right? Break the glass     shout/ break the glass     force the room/break the thread     open/ the music behind the glass.” Unlike much experimental form in contemporary poetry, Valentine’s innovative internal fissures open up to the reader. She invites us in.

A warning, however: Valentine’s simplicity of diction and smallness on the page does not lessen the difficulty of these poems; nor will a reader discover scintillating descriptions or rich allegory in these poems; instead their complexity, like a broken glass, only refracts the light of the poet’s mind when reflected upon by the reader. If you look for poetry only in the words, only on the page, these poems will disappoint as the speaker admits: “She lost her tongue. It was her taste/ for life, for herself, for others.” For Valentine, words and taste go hand in hand, poetry and hunger. Though layered, the poems themselves are not altogether satisfying—more like fishing lines cast into water, no fish caught, not yet reeled back. Turning the phrase, “a matter of time,” on its head, Valentine writes “Time is matter here” (in a poem of the same title), again playing with the sense that the abstract is tangible and the moment physical.

In tune with the intimacy of timing at the heart of the lyric genre, Valentine herself perhaps best sums up the feeling of entering her poetry in the poem “The Valley”: “…edge by edge/bare field by field/ I walked through it through you.”   Though from time to time tongue-in-cheek, these poems, full of restless questioning and dream-like memory require patience and attention to unfold their syntax: take for example the poem “The World inside This One,” which opens with a simile comparing steamer trunks to open books and continues “the world inside of that one/ mass graves/like in this one// Inside of that world/someone painting/animal-souls//Inside the dark huge sounds.” The cleverness never seems at the expense of compassion.

If these fragmented lines are the broken glass of a cup (an image that appears in an early lyric: “they’re only cups if you’re thirsty, you aren’t thirsty”) it appears that what remains unsaid, that which spills around the words, is the sustenance. Poetry cannot be contained by language alone. Valentine’s poems do not feel built or crafted but rather chiseled away, plucked at, even stripped. It is by breaking through that we may get closer to life, knowledge, death, beauty—what lies beyond. That is why, regardless of the often barren imagery of the shorter lyrics, the final apostrophe to Lucy is most poignant and moving. Here is the candidness of a mature poet bowing in uncertainty before the first creator, Lucy, neither God nor literary figure, but one who knew true poetry—life and death—without knowing “language,” as humans have since constructed and defined it. Valentine’s spirit of questioning is very much alive, her voice dazzled with reverence: “I wonder Do you sleep and wake/where you are now? …//You must know/ everything.”