Lost and Found: Poems 1975-1982

`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-siècle 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 "What the narrow-minded / conceive of as reality is only the first step. / We have lived elsewhere." '