Because “Seeing You” has been published twice in book-length collections by Valentine, it is appropriate to look at the critical reaction to both books. The River at Wolf was called “daring” in the Virginia Quarterly Review, which goes on to state that the poems “succeed by not giving in to melodrama or sentimentality; they focus on details of great clarity.” The reviewer for the Virginia Quarterly Review adds that many of the poems, such as “Seeing You,” “repeat lines, with a resonant echoing effect,” observing that “occasionally the repetition drowns out the poem, and sometimes the resistance to the maudlin is so great that the narration sounds harsh.” The poet David Rivard, in a critique of The River at Wolf for Ploughshares, says that Valentine “faces head-on the most serious mysteries of desire and death.” Rivard describes the poems in this volume as “intense, calligraphic lyricism...