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"Like jazz, poetry occasionally finds those whose lifelong dedication to the art makes them incapable of hitting a false note. Among the few contemporary masters . . . stands the Bay Area's own Barbara Guest." —San Francisco Chronicle
A meditation on the difficulty of assemblage and a reflection on the poetic process.
Rocks on a Platter began as an attempt to write about the making of a poem and in so doing, establishes a literary approach other than the essay form, with the rocks of the title being offered for the poem's construction. The resulting long poem is a meditation on the difficulty of assemblage and seeks to express and reflect on the poetic process. Barbara Guest's densely but deftly allusive poetry reveals the range and depth of her cultural knowledge, bespeaking a major poet at the peak of her powers.
Guest's work is saturated in the visual arts and music, and extends the formal experiments of modernism, playing abstract qualities of language against its sensuousness and materiality, and switching effortlessly from the real to the imagined. Innovative, intimate, erudite, her poems articulate a feminist aesthetic that seeks not to dispel mystery but to elaborate and perpetuate it.
"Subtitled 'Notes on Literature,' Rocks on a Platter is a poem and a reflection on poetic making. Nietszche, Rilke, Hoderlin, Adorno and other worthies peep through the curtains, and an assortment of allegorical kings and rocks and shipwrecks act out the poet's concerns."—Chicago Tribune
"Its title evokes, at different times, the Western seacoast with dolphins, a Zen rock garden, a pumpkin, ancient ruins, and typeset characters on a page -- the transient world of things . . . There is economy, tenacity, and wit to admire here."—Library Journal
“Barbara Guest's newest book, The Red Gaze, is full of poems that are like good cinematography: fluid, visual, and surprising. ...The Red Gaze is itself a 'genuine work of art,' a great rarity that progresses with equal skill through the visual and intellectual. ...This book is a welcome addition to Guest's masterful body of work.”—St. Mark’s Poetry Project Newsletter
"Barbara Guest is one of our most important poets. Rocks on a Platter gives us an airy, shimmering sense of life where mind and body are equally vibrant and equally tenuous. An electrifying fusion of poem and poetics -- and a delight to read."—Rosmarie Waldrop, author of A Key into the Language of America
"Barbara Guest's enormous importance on the American poetry scene is demonstrated once again by Rocks on a Platter. Surprising, unsettling, humorous, astute, this poetry realizes the vital presence of words in their historically charged contemporaneity. Guest's page invites eye and brain into the spatial beauty of the astonishingly actual, the electric silence of pure potential."— Joan Retallack, author of How To Do Things With Words
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BARBARA GUEST has published fourteen volumes of poetry since 1960, as well as a novel entitled Seeking Air (Sun & Moon, 1996), the biography Herself Defined: The Poet H. D. and Her World (Doubleday, 1984), and The Confetti Trees: Motion Picture Stories (Sun & Moon, 1999). She has earned many awards, including the Longview Award, the Lawrence Lipton Award for Literature, the Columbia Book Award, and NEA fellowship, and the Poetry Society of America’s Frost Medal for Lifetime Achievement.
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