Selected Poems of Barbara Guest

When first published in the 1960s, Guest was associated with the New York poets, a group, including John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara, that was influenced by the art world's abstract impressionist movement. But, as this important selection demonstrates, in the 30 years since then Guest has evolved a style of her own, combining meta-poetical, impressionistic word painting with philosophical musings evocative of symbolists like Mallarme. With rich language and refracted line-breaks and stanzas, she achieves a distinct tapestry-like quality, an effect complemented by a poetic landscape often populated by medieval icons and royal figures. Earlier poems like ``Sand'' and ``A Handbook of Surfing'' offer language as a sensual experience; in selections from her most recent collections, Fair Realism (1989) and Defensive Rapture (1993), her interest in visual aesthetics (Guest regularly contributes to Art News) seems translated into poetry: ``I/ created a planned randomness in which color/ behaved like a star'' (``The Screen of Distance''). Very like beautiful abstract paintings, Guest's poetry defies literal interpretation, its language setting the ``tone values'' of subjects ranging from the color black to the loss of memory. (June)