Ghost Guest: Poems

by Rachel Hadas

Praise for Ghost Guest

In Ghost Guest, Rachel Hadas embraces important and eternal themes—family, mortality, the relentlessness of time passing, the unreliability of memory, the fresh renewal of returning spring—and treats them with the utterly flexible skill of her seasoned and artful decades-long practice, being now conversational in tone, now notational in style, suddenly deftly formal, or classically lyrical. This latest collection offers constant pleasure, enlightenment, and surprise.
     —Lydia Davis, author of Our Strangers

Rachel Hadas has long been one of the essential voices in American poetry, sustaining her readers with a steady, steadying supply of observations and meditations couched in disarmingly intimate tones and coolly classical rhythms. This latest collection finds her clearing out the store of priceless impressions built up over a lifetime and asking, at the end of the opening poem, “What is there I will not let go?” The answer lies in the elegies, recollections, and reflections that follow—a tonic offering of wisdom, an antidote to the flood of “toneless syllables / marching across countless little tablets.”
     —Boris Dralyuk, author of My Hollywood and Other Poems

Like late Rembrandt, Rachel Hadas creates in the glow of candor and acceptance. Like late Elizabeth Bishop, Hadas writes with the wonder of detail. She is that rare poet of whom we can say that even after twenty volumes, she composes with refreshing ease, warmth of craft, and a probing curiosity about the thin line between the lived life and the afterlife. In Ghost Guest Rachel Hadas writes from her personal Parnassus.
     —Molly Peacock, author of The Analyst: Poems