surface as object: Barbara Guest's Selected Poems, The

American Poetry Review, The, Jan 1996 by Einzig, Barbara

A Selected Poems creates a new picture of the body of a poet's work, drawing an image of that body's proportions. It is an array, in the sense in which the word is used in mathematics, an ordering that establishes already familiar poems as the coordinates of the work as a whole.

Imagining these poem-coordinates as stars in the sky over the contained world of the particular poet, in the concentrated space of one volume they now assert new lines between one another, outlining shapes and figures of the poet's work, its unities and constellations.

In a dark, clear night sky the shapes of constellations appear, so that we say "There it is] the corona borealis]" Our companions see it too; how amazingly definite constellations are, considering they are incorporeal things whose figures--classical, mythical, in the shapes of bears, dippers, twins, crowns-are actually outlined only by distances, but distances in real space.

Within the "severe distances"(1) of these lyrical(2) figures, space and time coalesce.

Reading within Guest's Selected Poems as if within this planetarium, two observations occur.

The first is how radically her art succeeds in mixing up time, compounding historical eras and thus: fulfilling the vision of the early twentieth century poet Velemir Khlebnikov, who imagined that the new artists of our century would "colonize time as others do space." She fuses the classical, medieval, and modern in a unique style of gestural realism.

Secondly, her increasing focus on the surface of language has developed organically from her background as a poet of the New York school; the poems embody her conviction that "poetic language comes from the same place as experience,"(3) offering not only a fresh sense of being fully "in" poetry and "in" the world, but also a new perceptive on what linguistically-foregrounded poetry is about, suggesting that concentration upon the "word-as-such"(4) may offer a way of expressing within poetry the tension and violence of our time. (My reading of Guest's work in this regard draws upon the basic axiom presented by Gertrude Stein in her essay, "Composition as Explanation," where formal poetic composition is interpreted as part and parcel of the poetics of culture.)

Regarding the first observation:

As Mandelstam wrote about Dante, "poetry establishes itself with astonishing independence in a new extra-spatial field of action,"(5) a terrain characteristic of the medieval--namely, a hinge or continuum, a connection between physical events and spirit, where things bear sympathies and antipathies toward one Another, and one scene is overlaid upon another in a process based upon "the likeness of unlike things."(6)

Barbara Guest declared recently that "I believe I may be looking for a time and place that is mediev."(7) In fact, the work in this volume, culled from books whose dates of publication range from 1960 to 1993--Moscow Mansions, Fair Realism, and Defensive Rapture, among others--is in its composition thoroughly mod, a music that is less a harmony of the spheres than a orchestrated tension between them. If we are in the cloisters, they are cloisters that have been transplanted in fragments, on barges, to the northern tip of Manhattan; if there is a countess, she is "The Countess from Minneapolis," living in Guest's work of that title in a house with a parquet floor, "so disturbed by its removal here to Minneapolis" that it is "broken in spots and mended" (88).

These poems, which formally work irregularly--in units ranging from image, paragraph, line, refracted line, phrase, and word--are often occupied by words, objects, and personages that are ancient and classical.

Charon, Hecate, Jove, Odysseus, Cyclops, Leander cross over into the text, but they usually swim back, shy of a classical story, appearing instead as shards of their original narratives, clues, fragments of the mythologies of another time. Guest's vocabulary is often archaic, full of kings, queens, bits of Italian, lavishly sensual to the ear and eye. The words are often relics, and they exist in a collage of contingent realities:(8)

It is the wind, the rubber wind

when we brush our teeth in the way station

a climate to beard What forks these roads?

Who clammers o'er the twain?

("Santa Fe Trail," 23)

Encountering the marble exactitude of things.

The precise pared from the round, the nubile.

Dawn after nightfall fog ; . . heavy semblance

sheltering like that chair. Waiting for balance.

("Nighthawk," 97)

The hues of geranium before they exit

his allotment of reality

("The Nude," 146)

Through these rich compounds of words the reader feels how the classical world and the medieval world persist in this one; fragments from these other times keep impressing themselves upon the poet, in the manner in which "Our Lady of the Goldfinch" appeared in continual incarnations to H.D., "at the turn of the palace stair."(19) Even when collaged in singly or as coupled phrases, the words exist as icons, fables, the decorated sites or stages of stories of which we now have only these words, each a sort of proscenium, an entranceway to another reality that does not unfold narratively on the page but must somehow be invisibly entered through the page, an arcane dimension behind it. While this fragmentation makes the composition modern, at the same time a sense of courtly love is present, the mind courting the world as the words attend, wait upon one another: