About Barbara Guest
Barbara Guest (September 6, 1920 – February 15, 2006) was an American poet known as a member of the first generation of the New York School of poetry. She spent most of her childhood in Florida and California. After graduating from the University of California at Berkeley, she settled in New York City where she connected with the equally emerging New York Poets and artists of Abstract-Expressionism who were then to influence her poetry. She wrote more than 15 books of poetry and she was awarded the Frost Medal for Lifetime Achievement by the Poetry Society of America in 1999. Among her most well-known poems are “Parachutes, My Love, Could Carry Us Higher,” “Wild Gardens Overlooked by Night Lights, (MP3)” “Roses,” and “Photographs.” During the 1960s The Location of Things, Poems, and The Blue Stairs were published. Moscow Mansions (1973), The Countess from Minneapolis (1976), and in particular her novel Seeking Air (1978), pointed to a sense of structure moving in more varied and experimental directions. This was true of her acclaimed biography of the poet Hilda Doolittle, Herself Defined (1984), which had consumed five years, and especially of a major poem, The Türler Losses (1979), and of Biography (1980). Fair Realism (1989) was followed by Defensive Rapture (1993), of which a critic has observed that Guest was now “pushing the reader into the spiritual and metaphysical possibilities of language itself.” Both books were highly acclaimed: Fair Realism was awarded the Lawrence J. Lipton Prize for Poetry, and Defensive Rapture was chosen for the San Francisco State Poetry Award. At this same time, Guest left New York City, moving to Berkeley, California.In 1995 her Selected Poems were published, and marked a continuing international recognition of her writing. The work was chosen as the best collection of new writing by the America Awards. Her Quill, Solitary APPARITION won the same award in 1996 for the best new book of poetry. In 1997 Guest took her work in yet newer directions with the publication of The Confetti Trees, fictional film scripts written in her highly lyrical style.
Browse all poems and texts published on Barbara Guest
The sky sinks slowly inside the past or her pragmatic advice, When in trouble depend upon imagination.
