If Nietzsche had been an American woman steeped in 20th-century modernist arts and letters and had undertaken to articulate how one can look back over a long life yet still grasp each present moment in its fullest intensities, he might have written like Guest, who invokes him repeatedly in this gorgeous, rigorous collection. The author of an acclaimed biography of H.D., the novel Seeking Air
, a book of critical essays and more than 20 books of poems, Guest won the Poetry Society of America's Frost Medal for lifetime achievement in 1999. In short stanzas and single lines that pour over the page, Guest writes as if recording the topmost level of impressions that have roots in unfathomable histories, personal and historical, "becoming less and less until the future faces you/ like the magpie you hid,/ exchanging feathers for other feathers." The diction of myth and fairly tale mixes freely with abstraction, image-rich observation, archaism and aphorism, but Guest's own unmistakable sensibility pervades every line. The result is uncannily beautiful and mercurial, clothed in a playfulness that comes of the deepest feeling: "Once more riding down to Venice on borrowed horses,/ the air free of misdemeanor, at rest in the inns of our fathers." (Apr.)
