The Selected Poems of Barbara Guest

The essential poems of Barbara Guest
Barbara Guest (1920-2006) was one of the most formally inventive poets of postwar America. Moving from the witty, image-driven lyricism of her early years among Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler, Guest moved toward an increasingly radical engagement with abstraction, visual art, and the materiality of language on the page. The Selected Poems of Barbara Guest, edited by Norma Cole and Joseph Shafer, traces the full arc of her invention. Drawing on Guest's entire oeuvre, from The Location of Things (1960) and Moscow Mansions (1973) through Fair Realism (1989), Defensive Rapture (1993), and the late, increasingly dispersed works Rocks on a Platter (Wesleyan, 1999) and The Red Gaze (Wesleyan, 2005), this volume shows a poet of the daring imagination. In her introduction, Elizabeth Willis argues that Guest's lifelong commitment to poetic risk positions her as one of the essential lyric experimentalists of twentieth-century American poetry. Guest continually reinvented what a poem could do. Here, her essential work is gathered in a single volume for a new generation of readers.
[Sample Poem]
Windy Afternoon
Through the wood
on his motorcycle piercing
the hawk, the jay
the blue-coated policeman
Woods, barren woods,
as this typewriter without an object
or the words that from you
fall soundless
The sun lowering
and the bags of paper
on the stoney ledge
near the waterfall
Voices down the roadway
and leaves falling over there
a great vacancy
a huge leftover
The quality of the day
that has its size in the North
and in the South
a low sighing that of wings
Describe that nude, audacious line
most lofty, practiced street
you are no longer thirsty
turn or go straight.