A Poem by Barbara Guest from The Red Gaze

               

The Red Gaze is a great collection to read during the descent of autumn into winter.

This collection published in Guest's winter is a strange mutation of the Keatsian, seen through the prism of the newborn 21st century.

I think as much of Keats and Tennyson, of Browning and Dickinson, as I do of her twentieth century colleagues in the art.

It is a collection bravely anachronistic and sometimes futuristic at the same time.

As with all of Guest's writing, linear time is simply irrelevant.

Sometimes I think her poems speak in Australian aboriginal terms...the Australian aborigines have no use for linear time either.

And even as death enters many of the poems in this collection, it is transmuted by a rare and wry humor which could just as easily be called "her usual prescience."



      A Short Narrative



Your painting took a long time to dry.

It was sent to Rome to give it a royal luster.



Your thoughts the evening before had been gloomy.

They would not forget rumors accompanying you.



Lo, Royalty had placed a hand on your head.




Nobles twist their rings in corridors,

worried about painting's future.