The Starlight Room by Lesley Valdes

In “The Pianist Speaks,” Lesley Valdes considers the accomplishment of Robert Schumann’s work. “Something in the inner voices in the middle register,” she reflects, “harmonies that reach don’t overreach / the way an ordinary life is lived.” These words stand equally as ars poetica for the poet’s work in this beautiful debut collection. In poems that richly evoke the lives of composers, musicians, beloved family members, and often both, music brims The Starlight Room, no less so in the moving resonances of her lines—vividly present, elegiac, and filled with quiet duende.

–Daniel Tobin, author of The Mansions

I already knew this much: that poet, pianist, and music critic Lesley Valdes has an astounding ear for both silence and sound— “harmonies that reach don’t overreach”—but her eye is brilliantly at work in these pages too.  Such images!  Starlight from tiny bulbs, colors that infuse and explode in Miami, stills and movement from memory, its grief making joy possible. The great ones float here too—Beethoven’s counting out 60 beans for his coffee each day, Glenn Gould’s preferring Bach for his desert island. But also Tatum and Ellington, and the poet’s lost beloved father: “those feathery tones/that make you want to rush/to save them.”  Early on, Valdes writes “I saw them again/ I thought it was a dream.” You know what?  Happily for us, it is not. It is here for us to savor.

–Marianne Boruch, author of The Anti-Grief

The best poetry aspires to music, and Lesley Valdes‘s The Starlight Room achieves that as do few others, by treating musical subjects and themes with a precise emotional delicacy. All blend seamlessly with her own experience through “harmonies that reach,” but “don’t overreach” and reveal the fullness of “a woman’s love and life.”  Lesley Valdes has given us one of the best chapbooks I have ever read.

–Rodney Jones, author of Alabama