Defensive Rapture

by Barbara Guest

Barbara Guest's poems, 1993.

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

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]

Width of a cube spans defensive rapture
cube from blocks of liquid theme
phantom of lily stark
in running rooms.
- Defensive Rapture

The 1980s passed without a new collection of poetry by Barbara Guest. (Her last significant collection, The Countess from Minneapolis , was published in 1976; followed by a few minor collections: The Türler Losses in 1979, Biography and Quilts in 1980.) What a long decade that must have been. (Not to mention AIDS, Reagan, and Thatcher.) And then, miraculously, 1989 arrived. Barbara Guest published one of her longest collections, Fair Realism , as if making up for lost time. (Not to mention the fall of the Berlin Wall.) Indeed, the 1980s ended with a bang!

Fair Realism , however, marked a slight departure from Guest's early collection. Inspired by the New York School poets, with whom she is associated, and the Imagist poets (especially H.D.), whom she admired, Guest's early collections are notable for their unfettered experimentation. Whereas Fair Realism ventures into the realm of the accessible. In fact, it may be her most accessible collection.

Defensive Rapture, on the other hand, may be Guest's most inaccessible collection. Indeed, it is a return to form. Anticipated by Musicality (a minor collection published in 1988), in which Guest utilized the same style that would appear in Defensive Rapture (surprising that it didn't appear in Fair Realism ). The style is difficult to characterize. A line in one of her poems characterizes it better than I ever could: "held in mortar air. / "weight of stone" / fragment." ("Paulownia", viii) The line may sound cryptic, but in itself it captures the juxtaposition in her language. And yet it can be applied to one thing: her style, something confined to a shape ("mortar") and yet ethereal in its testing the boundaries of that shape ("air"); the "weight" of her words (indeed, like "stone" in their simplicity that conceals their profundity); and perhaps the most apt description of Guest's new style is "fragment", applicable to the form and the content...

the example of cyclonic creativity equally devastates.


to sketch "A Favourite View" ethnically positions
 two strangers who join hands in a movie
 without sound


one leaps on the other's lap
 a cloud


or Purcell muslin intimidating in
anxious-less moments when thoughts provoke


drained hands
 lightning held to a border of trees


patient exercise of drawing a visible number
chromatically the structure unfolds
 a formal delicacy



when she hitches up her notebook and sits under
the Steinway the blue trees vanish.
 "the Willies"


 cobbled breeze
 a pearl snatched from its shell

 in that moment

 as the sky slowly

 Musicalities
 - from Musicality


 the visible

as in the past


 subsisting in layered zone

 refuses to dangle

 oaths on marsh field


 whitened or planned

 memorial distance


 rather than vine

 that which proliferates


the bittersweet grapple

 initiates

 a mysterious mesh

forbids the instant disclosure

 delay a humid course

or creates a patina

 jungleware.


or she moving forward into

the line of sticks

 circled by sticks

odor of lines.



 knowing the difficulty

 annexation of Egypt

 oaths on marsh fields etc.


 a possible intimacy with

 the tomblike fragrance of stone

 the cult-like

 expressiveness.

 (the perpendicular

millimetre stone

 less raw


 or, gangling

as the artful

lessening surprised.)


 tree grown guava

 oaths on marsh field

the hungry minstrel and the forager

gold on the guava lick of rosin

and the chill latched thicket

marsh weed

regardez-là 

the untamed ibis.
 - The Surface as Object

In my review of , I compared Barbara Guest to James Schuyler (albeit superficially). Defensive Rapture, published shortly after Schuyler's death, contains a poem dedicated to the late poet. Its title, "The Glass Mountain, is reminiscent of the title of one of Schuyler's collections, The Crystal Lithium...

i

 king as wanderer

 replied we do and always

the least recounting

pelting dew

bird in the sunrise room;


once or twice the landscape burns

what we are after tires

clouds mohair.


rhododendron bring

 pods to the mountain;


a tremulous position

harp on a mountain of glass.



ii

 is it power

you pass in the night

taking water from the tap,


fog or phantom

the king stares at.


 you are not the snake lady

gold filament above

the snake limbs

nor does she tell

who taught the dance.



iii

 the king watched


in flat country the

caravan at ewe season


a density

sand and thyme


 near the threshold

where they milk

have bitten the nut-

like substance



iv

bauble of sound

mahogany the king



travelling the length

overhead a climate

of twang the rushed snow


unstoppable space in the bold

different in the next imagined

movement the breach


is inimitable

a phase others believe

there is no escape


the towed rock dims.



v

 why not live

 image strewn

and goes pitter pat

next to the resolute corridor

and a diadem would hang on the fringe

actual pieces of tame fibre shut off.


on the steeple with the watercan

and thunder in the earring she

caught the speech of the termagant

the roll

was seen the plumage and owl

a raft on the cold river; skin

on the raft a king

picked up boards and sunk them.



vi

the shade lavished

in the ideal

climate of planets fear


steam rolling up;

holding hands in a ring

wet to their waists

 hair

a slippery blossom.


exposure beneath the May apse

 doggerel;

chunks of filched

 objects not

lapidary; a king.



vii

attend on detail

 the hullabaloo over

rule half water half worn

 running the notion of land;


tells us where light comes from

 white curtains in its break;

closer closer to the splintered mountain


O king endlessly

scattering.
 - The Glass Mountain in memory of J. S.

[Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

I always remember the title of this book as simply Rapture, which I know is wrong, but perhaps accurate in how this book feels to me, how it makes me feel. Barbara Guest's work is as good as we have in the last forty or so years -- particularly the books published in the last 15 or so years of her life.