TWENTY-FIVE YEARS TO LIFE

Valley offers a collection of poems about getting back together with an ex.

A couple breaks up when they’re young, only to resume their relationship decades later; this narrative is at the heart of this collection of simple, rhyming poems addressed to the speaker’s beloved. “Together, / One word that means you and me / Something we will always be,” the speaker wrote to her partner in the poem “Prologue” circa 1979. On its face, the speaker’s story is memorable, ripe for dinner-table badinage; in these verses, it unfortunately lacks resonance. Like so many young lovers, the pair drifted apart—this book celebrates the unlikely rekindling of their passion. “A true love abandoned, left unattended / Until a silence lasting decades, suddenly ended. // Two old lovers standing face-to-face / A dreamlike moment ends in an embrace,” reads the poem “Someday (Love Long Lost).” Each poem reads like a slight variation of the last, sharing the same kinds of surface observations and repetitive lines. As a result, the pieces feel more like refrains from old song lyrics than intentionally crafted verses. In several instances, it seems as though the speaker simply added line breaks to passing thoughts: “Since our last coffee / I think of you perpetually / Morning, noon, and night literally / You are always on my mind. // It’s been tough since our last coffee / But it is what it is / And I live with that / While I yearn for our next coffee,” reads “Coffee Time.” The poet’s straightforward style is broadly accessible, and the poems’ situations and emotional content will be relatable to most readers. But in this collection, tropes, impersonal abstractions, and vacant words take the place of the imagery, music, and embodied feeling readers usually hope to find in love poems.

This series of idle refrains renders a potentially meaningful life event banal.