One of the most notable members of the New York School--and its best-known woman--Barbara Guest began writing poetry in the 1950s in company that included John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara, and James Schuyler. And from the beginning, her practice placed her at the vanguard of American writing. Guest's poetry, saturated in the visual arts, extended the formal experiments of modernism, and played the abstract qualities of language against its sensuousness and materiality. Now, for the first time, all of her published poems have been brought together in one volume, offering readers and scholars unprecedented access to Guest's remarkable visionary work. This Collected Poems moves from her early New York School years through her more abstract later work, including some final poems never before published. Switching effortlessly from the real to the dreamlike, the observed to the imagined, this is poetry both gentle and piercing--seemingly simple, but truly and beautifully dislocating.
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Influenced by the same 1950s abstract art scene that forged the improvisational aesthetics of John Ashbery and other New York School poets, Guest (1920–2006) nevertheless eschewed the overt playfulness and "personism" of her male counterparts for more oblique modes that combined, say, Marianne Moore's painterly visual sense with H.D.'s and Gertrude Stein's concern with conceptual experimentation. Venturesome and exploratory throughout, Guest's work suggested directions for both "language" poetry and the postmodern lyricism that followed it, performing "a drama of exacting dimension" that questioned and refocused familiar poetic forms—lyric, narrative, prose poem—as if they were "composed with magic and euphony." In an insightful introduction, Peter Gizzi notes that Guest's poems "evoke the joy of being found," and the appearance of this omnibus, gathering the contents of Guest's published volumes from The Location of Things (1960) through The Red Glaze (2005), offers a grand occasion for that discovery. Recommended for most collections.—Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., NY
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
"(Barbara Guest's) 500-page Collected Poems belongs among the achievements of 20th-century modernism, a sphere overlapping almost nowhere with the mimetic, anecdotal, psychologically motivated poetry that predominated in the US for much of her career."--Ange Mlinko, London Review of Books
"The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest belongs on every poetry lover's bookshelf. This large and lovely volume, as the title suggests, contains all the poetry Guest published in her lifetime, along with a smattering of new, posthumous poems, a partial bibliography, a time line, and a fine essay by Peter Gizzi."--Dan Giancola, The East Hampton Star
"The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest...gradually reveals and artist's growing expressive confidence and self-possession. Despite the false starts and wrong turns, Guest found a way, mastering the labyrinth of tradition and influence. Her work is a struggle to render the order of perception in language, for clarity of the observed phenomenon."--Robert Huddleston, Mantis
"The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest belongs on every poetry lover's bookshelf. This large and lovely volume, as the title suggests, contains all the poetry Guest published in her lifetime, along with a smattering of new, posthumous poems, a partial bibliography, a time line, and a fine essay by Peter Gizzi."--Dan Giancola, The East Hampton Star
"The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest...gradually reveals and artist's growing expressive confidence and self-possession. Despite the false starts and wrong turns, Guest found a way, mastering the labyrinth of tradition and influence. Her work is a struggle to render the order of perception in language, for clarity of the observed phenomenon."--Robert Huddleston, Mantis
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Quiet here,
By The Passionate Ornithologist (Alameda, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest (Wesleyan Poetry Series) (Hardcover)
Must say I'm shocked no one in the poetry world has taken the time to acknowledge Guest's astounding poetic accomplishments here....moving thru painterly NY School to her own brand of abstract lyrical surrealism, she is/was truly a quiet giant, but one that seemed to confound most in the poetry world. The collected poems of Jack Spicer came out at the same time and seemed to capture all the attention...unfortunate. Once again it looks as though Barbara's work will be ignored.
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