SOURCE: Caples, Garrett. “The Barbara Guest Experience.” Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 30 (2001): 123-29.

In the following essay, Caples discusses how Guest's later poetry incorporates the theme of “wandering.”

going to your desk in the meadow finding a token in the drawer … 

—Barbara Guest, “Knight of the Swan,” Selected Poems

“Poetry,” Barbara Guest insists, “is an experience,”¹ and I quote these lines from “Knight of the Swan” (1973) freely out-of-context, for they strike me as very like the experience of reading her work. There's much imagery of wandering, then finding things, but the quest is never hurried, and the things you find are less things in themselves than proxies for them, tokens (but of what?). In Rocks on a Platter (1999), the image is an “Amulet cast from the pocket” (11), an object valued not so much for what it is as for what it conjures. But I'm less interested in the...