Barbara Guest is a writer I became obsessed with around 1999. I had purchased her Selected Poems a few years before that. What drove my obsession was my initial difficulty in reading her: she seemed too ethereal, too exquisite. Since these qualities are also what attracted me in the first place, my reading was seriously ambivalent. Stepping back a bit, I can more clearly identify things I don't like in some poems (preciousness) and love, less ambivalently, the poems that don't have that quality.

It's curious that the book jacket of her first book emphasizes her maturity as a poet, the fact that this is an atypical first book of poetry. She was 40 before she really published much of anything. From our present vantage point it looks like she was in a very early stage of her writing, that there was a great deal of stylistic inconsistency (not necessarily a bad thing!). At the same time, there are early poems of hers that are not all that different from what she was writing in the 1980s and 1990s. Her poetry becomes increasingly elliptical and rarefied--sometimes to the point that I lose her. Yet I keep coming back for more. I own an almost complete set of her books, thanks to bibliofind.

Notley and Mayer don't really come out of Guest. They derive more from Berrigan, Koch, etc...