The Red Gaze

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.