The Red Gaze

by Barbara Guest

The Red Gaze is one long poem divided into smaller poems on imagination and time, beginning with "Nostalgia" and ending with "Supposition." Within the quietude of these poems, a gentle music unfurls; precise and generous. The idea of imagination propels The Red Gaze; references and allusions to art, literature, and history create what has become a signature of Barbara Guest's work--the poem as the event itself. There is something very immediate, alive, and mysterious about these poems. Reading, we inhabit the art--for a brief time suspended in its vision. Over the past decade, Guest has increasingly come to be seen as a major force in innovative poetics. These new poems are delicate, rarified, and unshakable.

Genres: Poetry

48 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

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

[Rodney · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m waiting for the new Collected Guest to come out in paperback; in the meantime, thought I’d read as many individual volumes as the public library allows. Glad they had this one—“late Guest” depends on basic elements worked into complex traceries that the space and weight of stand-alone volume set off to good effect. Keywords like “stranger,” “shadow,” “departure,” “dreamer,” and “sleeper” create a crepuscular, fairytale world where meaning arrives in the clean lines of allegory or folktale, but with the folk sort of tucked out of sight behind the tapestry. The meditations on the act of painting in the second section moved me less, though the concerns are similar: the mysteries of presence and absence, “Structure and sensation,” experience caught between memory and “A sudden burst of color.”

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Red, purple, brown Guardian leaf.
Complications of red enter the leaf
and it is more accomplished,
turning brown then grey in varying attitudes
after the snow begins. Colourful complications
disturb serenity, causing our eye
to wander over the shaking tree.

Morning began with a concert of white.
Blue enters later.
- The Red Gaze (pg. 33)

Barbara Guest's last book, The Red Gaze is described by the publisher as being "a sequence of interconnected poems on imagination and time". Guest's preoccupation with time is evident from the first poem, "Nostalgia", and recurs throughout poems such as "Alteration" and "The Past".

Hands are touching.
You began in cement in small spaces.
You began the departure. Leaves restrain. You attempt the departure.
A smile in sunshine, nostalgia.
Beneath shadow of shadows of Columbus the Navigator. Waving farewell.
Street, shadows.

I have lost my detachment, sparrow with silver teeth.
I have lost the doves of Milan, floating politely.

 Recognize me, I shall be here, O Nietzsche.
 We have skipped down three pairs of stairs,
they are not numbered, they are oddly assorted, velvet.

 Recognize me in sunshine.
Bulletins permit us to be freer than in Rome.
Castles perched on a cliff.
Filled with pears and magic.

 I am not detached,
bulletins permit us comb, fish of silver.
A part of the tower
beckons to us.
 - Nostalgia (pg. 3-4)


In the sky a dilemma. Fountains rush by.
Home from the tournament beasts seek quiet.

Writing covers the desk.

 Your colonization of the infinite

 is a romantic departure.

I ask you to permit the image.

 and the alteration of time.
 - Alternation (pg. 14)


The form of the poem subsides, it enters another poem.
A witness was found for the markings inscribed upside-down.
It might have been a celebration, so strong the presence
of the poem. The sky sinks slowly inside the past.
 - The Past (pg. 21)

Imagination is approached with imaginative passages, such as Guest's notion of a "subject and predicate made of glass" in "Imagined Room"; it is approached thematically, as in "Roman Stripes"; it is also approached thematically with imaginative passages, as in "A Noise of Return"...

 Do not forget the sky has other zones.

 Let it rest on the embankment, close the eyes,

 Lay it in the little bed made of maplewood.
 Wash its sleeve in sky drops.

 Let there be no formal potions.
 A subject and a predicate made of glass.

 You have entered the narrow zone
 your portrait etched in glass.

Becoming less and less until the future faces you
like the magpie you hid,
exchanging feathers for other feathers.

 In the tower you flew without wings
 speaking in other tongues to the imagined room.
 - Imagined Room (pg. 7-8)


What is new in the fostering world beyond.
We ask its name, created by indentation,
learned to avoid the shark's fin,
emerged from a world of fins.

Once it was thought the spiral staircase led us
to uncounted rings.
Tonight there is no other fin.
Tonight there is sorrow created by rings
tipped with green.

I saw the stair mount upward and could not stop
its climb until the heavens opened blinking,
until we felt suspension.
An odyssey parades in stripes.
 - Roman Stripes for Johannes Beilharz (pg. 18)


We have seen the bowl toppled by morning crickets,
or imagined so, on our imaginary route,
it leads through the mountain. 
We are walking on a shadowy line gentle in its way.

Imagination has removed the harshness.
This is a filibuster of routes, concealed is the icy stone you tripped on.
It turns rocks into stone and promises
to listen to the morning tympanum.
felicitudes!
creating another tympanum.
 - A Noise of Return (pg. 25)

In addition, the publisher calls attention to Guest's "references and allusions to art, literature, and history". Art in "A Short Narrative", "Freed Colour" (a title reminiscent of a collection by another colourful member of the New York School poets, James Schuyler's Freely Espousing), and "Hans Hofmann" (among others)... Literature in "Nostalgia", "The Trickster", and "Modernism" (among others)... History in "An Afternoon in Jeopardy", "A Different Honey", and "Echoes" (among others)...

[...]
 Recognize me, I shall be here, O Nietzsche.
 We have skipped down three pairs of stairs,
they are not numbered, they are oddly assorted, velvet.
[...]
 - Nostalgia (pg. 3-4)


Pieces of tapestry with bird sewed on.
A ruin from Rome, and in the background a rope.

Old Europe declares itself.

In the banquet hall birds nest.
A stranger causes the water to flow,
the alphabet is full of sorrow.

In the passageway sits the stranger.

He is without sin or sorrow or soldiers who mount their horses
and race up and down the farthingale hills.

 He will not dine with the others.
 They knew not he was an emperor
 described as a poor man in disguise.

He has cast away his steel to rest beside the maiden.

 Shadows are everywhere. Oddness begins.
 - An Afternoon in Jeopardy (pg. 5-6)


Close up shop
is what happens in Milan
and places older.
Who is protecting us,
we who were noticed by the Emperor
cruising in his vessel?
Remember navigators
tasting lemons from the trees
of their birthplace.
Do we know how they felt,
born under different signs?
Silent are honies in velvet cups.
 - A Different Honey (pg. 11)


Your painting took a long time to dry.
It was sent to Rome to give it a royal luster.

Your thoughts the evening before had been gloomy.
They would not forget rumours accompanying you.

Lo, Royalty had placed a hand on your head.

Nobles twist their rings in corridors,
worried about painting's future.
 - A Short Narrative (pg. 12)


There is no system, no one writes in Greek.
It is empty here after the seismology,
one relies on sensibility that monitors
movement on a mountain top.

Corrective light that carried shadow away
to another visibility.

Coyote before he opens his mouth.
Hidden in the canyon on a ledge
full of games and myth.
 - The Trickster (pg. 19)


The dreamer enters the room wearing a garment of red cloth.
On his feet are shoes of magic, they will carry him hither and yon.
He has dipped his pen into magic ink and cleared
the ordinary from the room.

We too, have heard the midnight chime and reached for our silver spoon,
as midnight stirs a coffee cup we praise modernism.
Restless leaf modifies his poem.
 - Modernism (pg. 22)


The branches are placed in a wet cloth,
clover reaches out.

They cannot locate blue vine.
Purple fills the agenda. Red is on the plant,
the setting of a hibiscus tree.
They are warned not to linger in the purple shade.

Are these bitter colours? Are they accompanied
by rhyme to cheer them when they cross
into that land where colour is rare?

They hasten to make use of freed colour
who bends to no one,
who dwells in a tent like rhythm
continually role.

To stop the riot of colour, to hasten the quiet paucity of rhythm,
to sleep when it is time.

And doors open into a narrow surprise.
The jingle of crystal follows you everywhere,
even into the whistling corridor.
 - Freed Colour (pg. 26-27)


[...]
Going each day to the park bench, she begins to absorb
her surroundings.

Each day the park grows colder.
Who is sitting at the end of the park bench?

He is the painter Hans Hofmann, he is the famous painter.
(this is true). Talking in an atmosphere of colour.

Listening in an atmosphere of colour.
[...]
 - Hans Hofmann (pg. 38)


Once more riding down to Venice on borrowed horses,
 the air of misdemeanour, at rest in the inns of our fathers.
 Once again whiteness like the white chandelier.
 Echoes of other poems . . .
 - Echoes (pg. 43)

The Red Gaze ends with a quote from Theodore Adorno, a quote that summarizes (in part) Guest's poetic ambition...

"In each genuine art work something appears that did not exist before."
- Theodore Adorno

What better way to end Barbara Guest's last book?

[Monica · Rating 4 out of 5]

A poem as a painting.
A poem as a way to understand paintings.
Poetry as a gaze.
A red gaze: always seeing maple leaves in fall.
Abstract poems: still, calm, & meditative.

[Yvonne Strumecki · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was just over my head. I feel awful/stupid for saying it, but I whole-heartedly tried. Took some poems apart line by line to see if I could make some sense. And I just couldn't. Feel like a failure as a poet.