Selected Poems, a lavish volume published in 1995 by Sun and Moon Press, has served to draw much deserved attention to the demanding, versatile, and prolific contributions to American poetry of Barbara Guest, who has written more than a dozen books and chapbooks of poetry since 1960 as well as plays, art criticism, a novel (Seeking Air, 1978), and a much-admired biography of the Modernist poet, H.D. (Herself Defined: The Poet H.D. and Her World, 1984). Guest began writing in New York City during the 1950s as part of a closely knit group of poets including John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler, informally known as the New York School of Poets (a half-joking homage to the New York School of painters, the Abstract Expressionists they so admired). Her work, like theirs, was buoyant and energetic, linked aesthetically to painting and music and to the traditions of Surrealism...