The cutting-room

Plot

Harry Guest's second book contains his poems written in Japan during 1967-9. His narratives are increasingly rewarding in their tense complexity, his descriptive and domestic poems unexpectedly resonant. The book, which also contains two sequences of epigrams, closes with the poet's most ambitious work to date, a series of six poems entitled `Metamorphoses'. It is a worthy sequel to `Arrangements' and establishes Harry Guest among the few original voices to have emerged during the sixties. A selection of his poems appears in Penguin Modern Poets 16, together with Matthew Mead and Jack Beeching.