Lost and Found

Poems 1975-1982

Guest Harry

"Lost and Found" contains Harry Guest's work written during 1975-1982. "At their best Harry Guest's poems are outstanding for their precise imagery and expression of a refinement of sensibility towards atmosphere and emotion", John Cotton wrote in "Priapus" of his early poems. This is true of the more recent work collected here, which includes poems evoking landscapes and history, poems of love, friendship, "memory and desire". "Lost and Found" concludes with the powerful sequence of Elegies; reviewing the Pig Press edition of these in the "Times Literary Supplement", Anne Stevenson wrote, "They take place in an autumnal English landscape unthreatened by anything worse than natural age and death... The air of loving weariness and fin-de-siecle calm which Guest manages to convey in these meditations reinforces rather than undermines a philosophy of mystical resignation. Somehow everything in the end will be well: "What the narrow-minded / conceive of as reality is only the first step. / We have lived elsewhere".

About the Author

Harry Guest was born in Penarth, Wales in 1932. He read Modern Languages at Cambridge before beginning a career as a teacher in schools and universities in Japan and England. He edited and translated Penguin's "Post-War Japanese Poetry" (1972). Recent books include a novel "Lost Pictures and Traveller's Literary Companion to Japan". He was appointed Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Exeter in 1994. With his wife, Lynn Guest, a historical novelist, he lives in Exeter. "A Puzzling Harvest" is his collected poems 1955-2000. His translations include poems by Jean Cassou and selected poems by Victor Hugo, "The Distance, The Shadows". "High on the Downs", "A Festschrift for Harry Guest", edited by Tony Lopez, with tributes from friends, colleagues, fellow poets and translators, playwrights and many others, was published last year by Shearsman Books to celebrate Harry Guest's 80th birthday.

Back to the list of books