The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest

Starred review from May 19, 2008
Though she came to prominence late in her career, Guest (1920–2006) remains less well-known and less well-understood than fellow New York School poets John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch and James Schuyler. Like them, Guest (who was an editorial associate at Art News
from 1951 to 1959) has multiple threads from the visual arts running through the 20-odd books and chapbooks collected here, but what this collection reveals more than anything else is the striking, cohesive majesty of Guest's tone, which can be at once funny, deep and full of Eros while pursuing some pretty difficult images and ideas: “Vases! Throats! Lactations!/ The milk of time in the reservoir moon/ Stones with cloud currents as sylphs/ in nightclothes swim, moon on thicket/ stems climb vases, wastrels” (from “The Türler Loses”). Guest's three masterworks—Moscow Mansions
(1973), Fair Realism
(1989) and Defensive Rapture
(1993)—are worth the price of admission alone, but surprises like the hilarious The Countess from Minneapolis
(1976) or steely and charming late work like Rocks on a Platter
(1999) and Miniatures
(2002) might end up being many readers' favorites. This book, one of the year's essential releases, should be part of any library of 20th-century American poetry.

September 15, 2008
Influenced by the same 1950s abstract art scene that forged the improvisational aesthetics of John Ashbery and other New York School poets, Guest (19202006) 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 formslyric, narrative, prose poemas 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

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