Last Harvest

Harry Guest was born in Penarth in 1932. He read Modern Languages at Cam-bridge before beginning a career as a teacher in schools and universities in France, Japan and England. With his wife, Lynn Guest, an historical novelist, he now lives in Exeter. His Collected Poems, A Puzzling Harvest, was published by Anvil in 2002. A further collection, Some Time, appeared in 2010, while Shearsman also published a mixed volume of translations and original work, Comparisons & Conversions, in 2008. His many other translations include a selected poems of Victor Hugo, The Distance, The Shadows (2002) and the Penguin volume, Post-War Japanese Poetry (with Lynn Guest and Kajima Shozo, 1972).

Last Harvest brings together poems of place, poems on religion, poems on family and friendships, and poems that rebel against the passing of the years.[…]enough however here for mysteriestimes to get lost on, found againa different beauty, wilder, spread, bare andalways the past put there in stone to stay"Guest has a way of making so much of what he writes read as though it is a stream of consciousness, fresh and idiosyncratic. He is an observer, a reporter who allows the reader the space to interpret - nothing is crammed down the throat - it can simply be read or, for the more adventurous, delved into to uncover the layers of meaning." -John Mingay, Stride (on Some Times)"The publication of Harry Guest's Collected Poems (A Puzzling Harvest, 2002) was something of a revelation … [It] revealed that he had gone on developing, experimenting with forms, shunning popularity, performing very little, but continuing to search - in civilised cadences, with wit and genial authority - for a moral and spiritual centre." -John Greening, Times Literary Supplement