Frank Paino reviews
The Radiant
by Lise Goett

It’s impossible to express the inexpressible; however, if there is a poet who can at least touch the hem of such an ability, it is Lise Goett, whose work, in her latest collection, The Radiant (Tupelo Press), distinguishes itself through language that is a perfect comingling of flesh and spirit.

Here is a gospel of light delivered by a poet who possesses the mind of a mystic and an uncanny ability to infuse her particular kind of knowing into poems that “have the power to heal, / each of us restored by the spoke-light of another’s radiance.”

Make no mistake, this is not a book for those who prefer their poetry straightforward and easily accessible. Goett will make you work for it, but the rewards will be an embarrassment of riches, as in these unforgettable lines from “Palace:”

I saw first gate, then palace,
then the legendary halls

appeared, shimmered in the sun.
Draped in diadem,
the Spirit hovered—unheavened,

homed in spalls of ice, trees rimed
with last year’s fruit on straight, flagless stems,
semiquavers become quarter notes—

the sweet, shriven juice of all frost’s shrivings—
fleet, brief—
suddenly made radiant.

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In the space of 25 sumptuous poems, Goett takes readers on a journey as dizzying and full of surprises as life itself, all of it delivered as “a missive from the other side” that sagely suggests:

It is not enough to follow an idea to its end...
One must feel the dreamer dreaming oneself, and in this certainty, in perilous
times, allow oneself to drift.

Frank Paino has received a number of awards for his poetry, including a Pushcart Prize, an Individual Excellence Award from The Ohio Arts Council, and The Cleveland Arts Prize in Literature. He is the author of five books of poetry, including, Dark Octaves, just out from Longleaf Press.

Lise Goett is an award-winning poet whose prizes include the 2012 Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, The Paris Review Discovery Award, the Pen Southwest Book Award in Poetry and The Palette Journal Spotlight Prize. Her first book, Waiting for the Paraclete, won the Barnard New Women Poets Prize.