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Lost and Found

Poems 1975-1982

Harry Guest

Imprint: Anvil Press Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (128 pages)
(Pub. Feb 1984)
9780856460890
Out of Stock
  • Description
  • Author
  • 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-siècle 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.”’

    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 ... read more
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