Barbara Guest

Selected Poems

This creamy Selected Poems is only part of a life’s work in process and in progress and it is a good excuse for the one sin, of pride.  Not Barbara Guest’s pride in what we call her career, but our pride in the sparked, illumined language of her work, in the achieved possibilities of poetry in a culture devoted to advertising.  Few poets in the latter half of this century have registered so radically subtle and fiercely delicate an impact on our psyches as Barbara Guest.  She shifts the focus of the ecstatic poem from God to language, from subject matter to tone.  Her stylistic assurance and the exquisite care of her language, arouse us to discover radiant forms of perception in her poems, and in their music and structure, the expansive feelings that emerge from those perceptions

Like other ecstatic poetry, Barbara Guest’s work is concerned, often, with duration, with what Spinoza defined as “an indefinite continuation of existence.”  The Türler Losses begins with images of shadow and “midnight all a glimmer” and ends with an image of the sun coming down.  The poem suggests disparate intervals of writing that rupture the time of Eliot’s “Hurry up now, it’s time” which is the time of closure, of imperative, and of the patriarch. The Türler Losses weaves together a “fabric time.”  Guest refuses the nostalgia for a unitary historical narrative, allowing instead for time to be lost, for the crystal to be broken.  From the undertongue of the Modernist voice, she articulates a distinctive postmodern poetics of feminine time in which hours dissolve, in which myth and history blow through each other like colored smoke rings.  “Yes,” she writes, understating her insurrectionary intention, “I’d like to reorganize/ the way it was in the October scheme.”

Perhaps the central experience of Barbara Guest’s originality concerns the structures of her poems.  Often they have a Sapphic, fragmentary quality, as though the paper on which they were written had been ripped into strips.  The associations generated in her later work, particularly, are improvisatory and linguistic.  A poem such as “Ontronto”—from Defensive Rapture—takes place in an enchanting field of lyric.

In its six sections, the ballet of shifting pronouns and the alternating plain and italic typefaces tease from the vocabulary of chivalric romance a dialectic of absence and presence.  The frictive interplay of perspectives, of heroic and meditative tones, makes for a chromatic echoing, Guest’s characteristic music.

She fortifies her poems with strokes of color, with syntactical strategies that seem, more than anything, erotic in their evocation of an insistently transitory state, with reverberating vowels and with typographic associations.  When she writes,

            The shrived warm

            turns into serpent

            are

            no kingdoms

            is grass

for instance, Guest begs us to read “warm” simultaneously as “worm” (and maybe “warn” as well) and she suggests the dissolution of power both by defusing the logical charge of syntax and by juxtaposing “warm” with “serpent,” “kingdom” with “grass.”  The living glow fades; hegemony gives way.

In this sense, Guest’s poems have always been political.  In her work, as in her poem “The Glass Mountain,” “a diadem would hang in the fringe.”  Power is decentered and the king is, as she writes, “endlessly/ scattering.”  Guest’s passionate attention to the non-predatory practices of language, to using her particularly light-sensitive intelligence to construct in words a lifelong state of wonder, is both an aesthetic and political engagement.

If there is a prevailing atmosphere in her poems, it is auroral.  A tender, abstract tone holds together dislocated shards of a luscious vocabulary as fog holds light.  In Guest’s poems we find the fulfillment of Valery’s insight: “At the end of the mind, the body.  But at the end of the body, the mind!”