If So, Tell Me

by Barbara Guest

Poetry. "Lifts a spare shadow/ encircling vine,/ does not tarnish bauble/ from overseas and out of silver mine,/ drop in clamor and volume" ("Valorous Vine"). This new book is the first individual collection of poetry by Guest to be published in Britain. One of the last living representatives of New York School poetry, Guest's delicate imagery and enigmatic phrasing continue to produce work that is -- all at once -- widely appealing, wildly mysterious and wonderfully distinctive.

Genres: Poetry

47 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

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

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

 You are beheaded
much cast out that rolls on the ground, toss out thread
 of what worked
 to use or unlearn. If so, tell me.
 - If So, Tell Me

After spending nearly a decade writing in a form that I would describe as "ethereal" (from 1988's Musicality to 1996's Quill, Solitary APPARITION ), Guest has decided to reel in the kite. One can only spend so much time in the ether. It's so easy to get lost in the negative space of her poems. But if she had spent any more time in the ether, I'm convinced that her poems would have expanded into pages of negative space, a few words pepper here and there, but mostly negative space. Although it surely would have sent Guest into an obscurity more extreme than the obscurity she already inhabits, it is reminiscent of Guest's essay "Wounded Joy", in which she defines her poetic ambition thus: "The most important act of a poem is to reach further than the page so that we are aware of another aspect of art. . . . What we are setting out to do is to delimit the work of art, so that it appears to have no beginning and no end, so that is overruns the boundaries of the poem on the page" ( Forces of Imagination , pg. 100).

With her "ethereal" poems (1988 - 1996), Guest very nearly realized this goal. Indeed, her poems of this era appear to have "no beginning and no end"; they appear to "overrun the boundaries of the page". With If So, Tell Me, however, Guest has chosen a different approach. Perhaps she felt that she took the "ethereal" form as far as it could go? (As far as it could go - without, as I stated earlier, her poems being overtaken by negative space.)

Although the poems of If So, Tell Me have clear beginnings and ends (stanza breaks, etc...), her poems have retained in their content a quality of the "ethereal". Indeed, the "ethereal" is still present in the fragmentation of her thought, in the juxtaposition of her imagery...

Melting, the melt of snow into midnight,
preoccupied, half alive, an activity in slow motion
 still attached.

 Moves outside the text into the dark under text

 with closed eyes, detached, unmodified.

 A starry adultness
 took other means

 to lengthen the text,
 by emotion,

 and arguably noise


 wooed in this chapter and

 each page of,
 O real life.
 - In Slow Motion

What does this poem ("In Slow Motion") say about Guest's perspective? Is she acknowledging the shift in her style? Is she attempting to "lengthen the text" by other means than the "ethereal"? Are we to understand that she has shifted from the "ethereal" to the "emotional"? Is the "slow motion" to which she refers the pacing of her "ethereal" poems? Was this her goal, to pace her poems? What is the "arguable noise"? So many questions...

This new style, while it retains many qualities of Guest's "ethereal" poems, albeit to a lesser extreme, is perhaps better described as "effervescent"...

 Spill of ink, not enough
 lather.

 Ink spill
 lather on the Rock.
 Andromeda
 long hair nude body

 NOISE
 surrounds the painting on the right side it is
cracked the hair color changed dried paint altered the hand.
 Wire is inserted into the gold frame.

Figures wait in anxious groups distance takes away their height.
 there is a furious
 helicopter wind.

 They lower a rope onto the Rock.
 The painting is cracked, her neck is chipped
 pieces of gilt curl fall off. She grows more naked.

 Bone is exposed. The canvas mouth torn.


 AIR IS PHOTOGRAPHED!
 - Effervescent