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Waiting For The Paraclete (Barnard New Women Poets Series)

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I first encountered this brand of incredulity when, many years ago, I really looked long and hard at a painting by Ingres (The Bather). For the life of me, I couldn't figure out how it was done. Was this really paint? Did a brush lay it down? The picture seemed so perfect in matter, in its graceful redemption of the world. This is hard to explain. What I'm trying to say is, the artist didn't appear to have intervened; and here I was, a spectator beholding pure form, emotion flowing directly from the source of life. I am struck by the same sensation in reading this book. In these poems, one recognizes those old partners in time: love, death, despair, the absurd, and the divine, and one is astonished and even terrified at rediscovering all these bright and dark spots of our mortality. I love the way Goett gives little plots to the emotions. She tells me about what I know and don't know but most of all she fashions the astonishing uncommon substance of life and combines it with the unexpectedly common stuff of it, too--the earthy and unearthly--so that the reader is suddenly made aware of them both at the same time.

Goett's collection ranks among the best contemporary poetry I've read. I first came across her work in several well-respected literary journals, and was so moved by her extraordinary writing ability that I kept each journal to return to her poems again and again. Her subjects are compelling, her images vivid, startling, and fresh. Rereading this collection, I am newly amazed by what this writer is able to accomplish with language.

Goett uses words to lead, to touch, and to surround you with your world, revealing the corners that are familiar yet unexplored. Her words are magic, conjuring and revealing. I was drawn to sit and ponder life as seen through this wonderful poet. More a fiction reader, I was held by the words of these poems and so happy to have come upon this work. A must read - must own book!

These poems believe in the old-fashioned alchemical power of wisdom -- wisdom that comes in (sometimes painful) moments of change and self-revelation to transform the "matter" of the self, and which, in these states of illumination, can be written down and passed on to the reader, igniting a desire for transformation in the reader's own heart. There are lines in this book that have the power of Rilke: "You love life more than you know," call the mothers of "Thanatos." This is a gorgeous, richly satisfying book of poems.

Lise Goett's debut collection is a rare gift. Here is a poet who loves language and reminds us that poetry, at its core, is a visceral art form. These are wise, carefully crafted poems, but, more important, they are human. Each one is a journey--an odyssey. They are the kind of poems that you will find yourself returning to again and again, the kind that will be read, studied, and discussed for generations to come. You will want to sleep with this beautiful book beneath your pillow.

"It is beginning to snow," writes Lise Goett in her poem The Rescuers, "as it does in the dreams of the unhearing, /and you keep on walking." Then, in Numen: "I went out past the borders of town / and lay down with the silence of tractors."

It is good to be writing this, late October on the verge of All Soul's Day-Day of the Dead in Mexico-on the verge of snow. For Lise Goett's new (and prize-winning) book of poems, "Waiting For the Paraclete" is a welcome to this verge: the edge of summer and winter, life and death, desire and consummation, flesh/ spirit, the cliff, altar, kiss, the calling. So open the cover as you would open a door-the French doors of Paris, the icy meat-room of a butcher, the catalfaque of St. Catherine, a blind boy's empty socket, the gap between silence and speech. Open your own yearning and enter its cathedral, for you have come to a sacrament.

"It is hard to begin with a death," begins the book's first poem..."of what you thought would be your future." And what the future gives us, in this flow of canticles, is a river
whose course is sure, whose shape is as unfathomable as "islands bandaged in fog," whose attraction is total, often brutal, beautiful, fatal-and incarnational. The voice that beckons us is at once particular, contemporary ("...a rhapsody of movement along the Boule Mich / past the skewered meats of the Greek tavernas"...."Some fat guy from Nebraska wants to know the rest of the story." ..."your father fondling uncut cigars at the Petroleum Club"...a retarded child "tooling down the edge of the interstate / on a tricycle") and as archetypal as the soul's own memory ("All passion tastes of relinquishment./ The world is slipping away. / You who knew this music before light have begun to hear /...and even this music will continue without you,/ those tiny white lights strung through the treetops / taken down at the end of the holiday, intensifying your love.").

Lines-and music-like this are the gorgeous underpinning of Goett's alchemical structure. And they call, as the Sirens called Odysseus, with compelling power throughout her incantational collection. I'm tempted here to simply start reprinting verses-lines of atmospheric light, "election by fire," of water, black lingerie, of the beast (and breast) shaking in its harness; to draw more maps of this songline's own cartography. But that would be injustice; I can't show you the fish by holding up its parts.

Lise introduces her collection with a quote from Carlos Drummond de Andrade: "Save all of yourself for the wedding though / nobody knows when or if it will come." So, too, I'll save the whole of "Waiting For the Paraclete" for you. After all, who is the paraclete?

In Lise Goett's musically eloquent book, Waiting for the Paraclete, the human heart, her heart, beats in celebration of the spirit in its nakedness. Hers is a spirit that has seen and is seen. Hers is a heart that joyfully and painfully knows. Goett, in her honesty reveals herself in "Rescuers," "The honor of saving/is that the rescued kneels down/and puts his head/inside the jaws of the rescuer,/dying to all else except what the heart knows." Waiting for the Paraclete is a privelage for the human race.

This prize-winning first collection by Lise Goett is a treasure house of alchemical language that like her Eurydice who knows "too well/that no one resurrects you save yourself" manages, through layer upon layer of rich complexity, to bring the reader to epiphanies of insight and pleasure. I found myself savoring these poems' gleaned surfaces for their wizardly blending of the abstract and visceral, for how magically the concrete becomes incandescent. In "Antediluvian", a butcher whose hands "raw from the slaughter" suggests "There is nothing we would not kill with our appetites" also gives the speaker "white packages [...]of a sacrement." Rituals of sacrifice recur throughout the poems in this book, whether in a mother's hard earned tuition for school which becomes the bet for a better life when her beau loses his wealth on a racing horse and shoots himself, or the enactment of Gary Gilmore's execution in "Blood Atonement" or the lyrical recollections of failures of love (romantic or familial), the poems enact an incantation for surviviing what seems to defy survivial. The speaker tells us in "Rescuers", "[...]perhaps the heart strips itself/and goes down,/shedding its various selves/to fathom the nature of drowning:"

The stunning immediacy of so many of the images in WAITING FOR THE PARACLETE, imbues the detail with such particularity that, like the body itself, it acts as ballast and conduit for our deepest yearnings against the world's cruelties. Poems like "Of the Comb" and "Labyrinth" transform the violence of loss into a hymn of martyrdom. I found myself thinking of the biblical saints, St. Francis in particular, and of the tenuous journey that is the gamble for redemption in a fallen world. Like the speaker in "Swimming with Eels", "the covenant" that resonates in so much of this book is poetry's ability to leave us with the "glistening" of what otherwise has us living within a "circle of dread".

Lise Goett's flawlessly written poems describe other worlds yet powerfully lead you through these extraordinary places and people's lives by your own vulnerability and your own emotions. Her miraculous metaphors strike again and again at your core. I've read Waiting for the Paraclete three times and it's my number one gift to friends and family. Finally, a contemporary woman poet who gets it: sensuality, love, death, purpose, etc. An incredible tour de force- read it now.

I tend to read more fiction than poetry, but found this collection so appealing that I've decided I may need to change that balance. I loved the range of subject matter, and the sense that Goett was telling stories, creating stories, and altering the ordinary, all in one (and every) poem kept me enthralled. One of the real pleasures, also, of this collection was the experience of beauty it gave me as I read, the delight to the ear. In "Swimming with Eels" the poet's description of eels as "gold with an afterlife lit from within" as the poem's speaker "sees them rise out of clouds of decay, from the lake's silk bottom" made me recall what I love about poetry, the fact that when it is at its best, as it is here, it gives me the perspective of the Gods, in what must surely be their language.