[48/100]
A truism – by now, a cliché even – to speak of Guest's poems as "painterly." But they are, after all – poems acting & reenacting the "gaze" of the title, the act of seeing (the viewer's art) & the act of placing colors upon a field (the painter's). Spare poems, like a painter's spare palette, a canvas marked with only a few gestures of color – red, as the title (again) indicates, is prominent, tho never saturating. Perhaps the most purely aesthetic poems I've encountered in some time: that is, poems grounded in the satisfactions of the senses, shutting out the social, the political, the historical even – or setting them far to one side to pursue the immediate gratification of the eyes.
