Barbara Guest, the only female member of the 'New York School' of poets, died on 15th February in Berkeley, California, at the age of eighty-six. She was a key figure in the evolution of American poetry since 1945.

Born Barbara Ann Pinson in North Carolina in 1920, she grew up in Florida and Los Angeles. She studied at UCLA and at Berkeley, before settling in New York in the 1940s. Her first book of poems, The Location of Things, appeared in 1960 from Tibor de Nagy Gallery, which also published a first slim volume by John Ashbery, as well as work by Frank O'Hara and other members of the New York School. Between then and the publication last year of The Red Gaze, she produced more than 20 books, including Moscow Mansions (1973), the award-winning Fair Realism (1978), the novel Seeking Air (1978), and Defensive Rapture (1993). Her controversial biography of the modernist poet Hilda Doolittle, Herself Defined: The Poet H.D. and Her World, was published in 1984. Married twice, to the English émigré and translator Stephen Haden Guest, and later to the war writer Trumbull Higgins, she is survived by one daughter and one son.
 

Guest was frequently excluded by critics from the divergent grouping of John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch and James Schuyler, all of whom went on to receive mainstream recognition. However, Schuyler acknowledged her contribution to the so-called 'New York School' in a 1971 letter to Guest, observing that the "Founders of the School" had not been "a trefoil, but a star...and a five-pointed star at the very least." Her work is increasingly being recognised as a vital link between the modernism of H.D. and Virginia Woolf and the work of the avant-garde experimentalists. The appearance of Guest's Selected Poems in 1995 (published in Europe by Carcanet the following year) sparked renewed interest in this neglected poet by a younger generation of American poets and critics.

New York Poets II: An Anthology, edited by Mark Ford and Trevor Winkfield, was published in January 2006 by Carcanet. It includes poems by Ted Berrigan, Joseph Ceravolo, Clark Coolidge, Edwin Denby, Kenward Elmslie, Bill Berkson, Barbara Guest, Harry Mathews, Bernadette Mayer, Charles North and Ron Padgett.