Barbara Guest’s poetry draws from many of its sister arts–film, fashion, painting, music–and this latest collection shows the poet expanding her field of reference to include opera, figure skating, and ballooning as parallels to her own elegant risks. The book opens with an epigraph from Chekhov: "I have always been an ardent defender of Miniature Pieces." Though one would assume this refers to music, it might as easily suggest miniature paintings or tiny figurines. Yet Guest’s new poems seem not so much small or short pieces as longer, more epic works reduced, condensed, miniaturized. Like dioramas in a history museum Guest’s miniatures give us epic scale in a box: Dido, Arthur, and Benjamin Franklin shrunk to the space of the page. Despite their sense of condensation these poems are surprisingly buoyant and musical, Guest’s Mallarmean page arrangements and movable feet endowing these miniatures with "gala momentum" ("Shabby Boot"). If these poems have a musical counterpart they must surely be Webern’s orchestral miniatures, with their dramatic shifts from romantic crescendo to folk song pluck, arid scrapes succeeded by crashing chords-big sounds, little sounds, and the piece is over, the music left to hang in the air, as "Sound leaks into the future" ("Sound and Structure").
        Yet for all of her invocations of, and homages to, poetry’s sister arts, Guest’s compositional space is always the page, and her new poems often suggest large pieces of aged parchment eaten away by time. These poems hint at the epic as much by what is not there as by what is, precious words rescued from the dustbin of history. Guest’s penchant for medievalism is here in abundance, and while her earlier poems invoked the medieval world as a parallel to our own carnivalesque and warring times, these new poems emphasize the sense of temporal distance, of lost time. Archaic diction and gallicisms are used as tints to give these always fresh poems a patina of age, as in "Blue Arthur," a muted homage, perhaps, to Thomas Malory, who composed his Arthurian epic on scraps of paper while in prison:

       Aroused from bed with movement around him
Fasted and lay with malade. Waited with poem
                                                            folded into sorrow

Or as here, in "Transcription," where early music is also evoked:

          There is lip descendant placed on wood for viol outside
witherglass. Here is plentiful lambswool fife for thine, we pass
upward in front of mere clumsy, Knight of Andorra and pony.

In many of these poems Guest strikes an unlikely accord between the indeterminacy of post-New York School poetic practices and the "mere clumsy" of medieval folk art. Yet such evocations of the past are never merely decorative or aesthetic; in "Lost Speech," for example, the ravages of time have their ravagers, as Guest seeks to recover living speech from nameless plunderers:

Archaeology

                             with a lift of brow and occupation,
some of it mixed, as in that speech germinated
on layers of limestone, protects a lost speech in thick
wood plundered.
          A search for past occupational diversions.

          Let history commandeer your tongue at this elevation.

Guest’s Angel of History, unlike Benjamin’s, cannot escape the past’s inertial drag, however much her casual gestures ("lift of brow") might momentarily transcend grave (pre)occupations. As elsewhere, in her poem "Coal," geology here serves as a metaphor for history in a manner similar to Celan’s post-Holocaust excavations. This use of the past is new for Guest, and gives these little poems considerable heft.
           Miniaturization, per se, is not a new thing for Guest: one of her more recent books, If so, tell me, is filled with pieces as compact and musical as those in the first section of this book. The two succeeding sections that complete this new collection ("Pathos" and "Blurred Edge") are not "miniatures," despite what the book’s jacket proclaims, but are longer poems in the mode of Guest’s accomplished serial pieces, such as those collected in Quill, Solitary APPARITION. "Pathos" concerns a figure skater named Katya, whose elegant movements ("Lithe her romp!") are as much a model for Guest’s poetry as her falls:

                      She is falling 
                                                  Shiver of the fallen,
of the tulle skirt.
           Disarrangement of composition,
                                        Snow falling from tree.

The thematic concerns of the first section return at choice moments, however, as when Guest invokes, "the sorrow of falling / into an historical position," as Katya skates over ice reflective as a "mirror moving backward." The final section of the book, "Blurred Edge," recalls Guest’s previous book for Wesleyan, Rocks on a Platter, in its radical reconsideration of the hoary notion, ut pictora poesis, as the poet explores the "unworded distance at edge" of painted frame. Working tirelessly in the margins of the alleged New York School, Guest has quietly produced a body of work that continues to inspire new generations of poets and readers, as she extends poetry’s boundaries and her own. This latest book simply reconfirms what is thankfully becoming less of a secret: simply, that Guest is one of our finest poets, pleasing the ear with her incomparable music, challenging the mind’s eye with her formal innovations. She has few peers.