Lost and Found

"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 TLS", 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".