Dawn is “the red gaze.” It unburdens itself through poetry and its colors.
The Red Gaze is one long poem divided into smaller poems on imagination and time, beginning with “Nostalgia” and ending with “Supposition.” Within the quietude of these poems, a gentle music unfurls; precise and generous. The idea of imagination propels The Red Gaze; references and allusions to art, literature, and history create what has become a signature of Barbara Guest’s work—the poem as the event itself. There is something very immediate, alive, and mysterious about these poems. Reading, we inhabit the art—for a brief time suspended in its vision. Over the past decade, Guest has increasingly come to be seen as a major force in innovative poetics. These new poems are delicate, rarified, and unshakable.
“The Red Gaze is formed by light and the genius of fleeting observation. A red gaze is, to me, the after-gaze behind an after-gaze, the final dab of light on a painting. This is a book of pure pleasure and transcendent joy. I love it.” —Fanny Howe, author of Invisible
“These poems are powered by an associative circuitry of language generated by a dazzling, luminous perception. ‘We are ready for a new orientation,’ Barbara Guest declares. This book is her bountiful gift to guide us.”—Anna Rabinowitz, author of Darkling
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From the Book:
… Colorful complications
disturb serenity, causing our eye
to wander over the shaking tree.
Morning began with a concert of white.
Blue enters later.
from “The Red Gaze”
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BARBARA GUEST has published 28 volumes (23 of poetry) and has earned many awards, including the Robert Frost Medal for Distinguished Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Society of America, the Longwood Award, the Lawrence Lipton Award for Literature, and the Columbia Book Award. She lives in Berkeley, California.
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