Seeking Air

by Barbara Guest

AUTHOR OF THE RECENTLY ACCLAIMED SELECTED POEMS, DEFENSIVE RAPTURE, AND FAIR REALISM (ALL SUN & MOON PRESS), GUEST IS ONE OF THE MAJOR FIGURES OF CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE!

Genres: Poetry

184 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1978

About the author

Barbara Guest, née Barbara Ann Pinson (September 6, 1920 – February 15, 2006), was an American poet and prose stylist. Guest first gained recognition as a member of the first generation New York School of poetry.[1] Guest wrote more than 15 books of poetry spanning sixty years of writing. In 1999, she was awarded the Frost Medal for Lifetime Achievement by the Poetry Society of America. Guest also wrote art criticism, essays, and plays. Her collages appeared on the covers of several of her books of poetry. She was also well known for her biography of the poet H.D., Herself Defined: The Poet H.D. and Her World (1984).

Reviews

[Ian Durant · Rating 4 out of 5]

A “poet’s novel” in 103 meditations, this is brought to the UK reader by specialist publisher Grand Iota in 2021, originally published in NY in 1978. It is very hard to pin this book down - there is a narrative thread and characterisation built round the male narrator, Morgan Flew, his lover, Miriam, Amber Shay and a host of others, including Dark, who seems to be the personification of depression, his “black dog”. BG’s inspiration is Jonathan Swift and his diary and letters, and it is something of a commentary on male-female relationships. The narrative thread maintains some structure to a interior journey which is, in Barbara Guest’s words, a record of her 1970’s in New York, amongst the Abstract Impressionist painters and group of avant garde writers known as the New York School. The importance of abstract expressionism is evident in the hallucinatory feel to the internal dialogue and the collage-like effects. It feels like a hand held filmed documentary, one moment in domestic detail, the next in unexpected alleyways with a certain lyric quality to the distractions, or “the outside world that was bringing its debris”. Barbara Guest considered that she “grew up in the shadow of surrealism” and her arresting juxtapositions are evident in this, her only novel. John Myers described her as “of the lineage of Breton” and it is certainly the case that I felt on first reading that I only skimmed the meanings in this Pandora’s box of ideas. It made me think of the Ego and the Id, of fables and fairy tales, of love and possession, of fantasy and reality, of literature and the daily details of life and of the present and the past. Her regular references to writers as varied as Seferis, WS Graham, Richardson, Wordsworth, Barthes, Pushkin and Byron places her ambition in a very literary and historical context - these are tendrils of meaning which the bemused reader may grab hold of in moments of confusion. Or maybe the Afterward by Rachel Blau DuPlessis provides an anchor, helpfully included by Ken Edwards of Grand Iota. Thanks Ken, this novel deserves and will get several rereads!

[Chloe Faro · Rating 3 out of 5]

calling this a “poet’s book” is so goofy… it’s prose poetry! bah! meandering, sort of joycean obviously in its effort. the charm of this is of course that Barbara Guest wrote it, who wrote some of the most charming, compelling, and exciting poetry of the postwar era.
i do wonder why Guest chose to write a prose fiction novel, especially because she is clearly much more interested in image and rhythm etc: the arc of story seems elusive. the efforts to make the story cohesive particularly fail in this ongoing reference to Robert’s depression as “Dark”… “dark came again” and such. especially today it seems unbelievably trite.
treating the prose as poetry, if the reader can focus on it, might serve them better. Barbara Guest in that manner doesn’t fail, not ever, not even here. there are so many lovely ideas and images and even the free association that the book is composed of, to apparently some readers’ chagrin, is so wonderful, so clever, so exciting.
there’s a special special video online of Guest reading some of the early chapters of this book (interwoven with John Ashbery reading his own work) that is so so fantastic. i love Barbara Guest’s return to this image of snow and cherries and a coat!

[Bryan Fox · Rating 1 out of 5]

Evidently, this was her only novel (she was primarily a poet), and after forcing my way through it, I have to say, that's probably for the best. I am always looking out for alternative/non-traditional fiction, and stories told in vignettes, and I heard about this book and was intrigued. It's one thing if the various vignettes in a story (this book is comprised of over 100 of them) aren't exactly linear, but if they aren't linear AND they make no sense on their own, what you have is just word soup. There are characters who reappear throughout the vignettes; ostensibly, they are moving towards something. I couldn't, for the life of me, tell you what it is. If you rearranged the 103 chapters in this book into a different order, I don't think it would matter, and I don't think anyone would notice. Oh well, at least the Black Sparrow copy I purchased had a cool binding. Sometimes it's the little things...

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am confined to my home by restrictions self-inflicted. "House Arrest."
The house with its heavy consciousness.
All the rooms are full.
The furniture unable to breathe. Tables, chairs, sofas, rub against each other. Seeking air. Space in which to breathe.
He felt not claustrophobia, something more tiresome, urban, the tension of a subway. His living room.
An Ozu movie. Where the camera remains to show us the room after the inhabitants have left it. The room still full, burdened with presences.

[Terry Nguyen]

A poet's novel through and through. "Why are you so involved with Portugal?"