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"." Marilyn Tenenoff