Reading Lise Goett’s The Radiant is a thrilling confirmation that “poetry is not like. It is the very lining of the inner life” (CD Wright). A series of encounters with the body, time, place, memory, pain, ecstasy, and a lucent spiritual consciousness, The Radiant is an inspired haunt and visionary reckoning for our times. Goett’s book of poems is an illuminated manuscript for the 21st century.
As if hovering lit between earth and heaven, these poems construct from prismatic language a palace of abiding presence. The poet’s inquiry questions what lies before one’s eyes as well as behind them. How can memory redeem the present moment when history is being destroyed? How does one “unheaven” a sense of holy presence amid the cruelty and lies of our broken, disappearing world? Goett’s poems arc toward moments of healing.
She writes “the radiant” not as descriptor or mere quality of light, but as act and action charged by its illumination in language: “cottonwoods’ cadmium fire,” a heart throwing sparks as it leaves the body. Breathtaking encounters with loss, illness, and violation transform through the poet’s recognition of a lit-up, awakened presence
that you, yourself, become spindrift and peak,
become transparent as these spirits of the sea,
phosphorescent with dripping humanity. “Sophia” 62
As “Sophia” opens, the speaker has observed a girl costumed as a sparkling sea nymph, riding a float in a desert-town summer parade with its “rack of BB guns behind the VFW’s khaki brigade.” The parade passes a boarded-up bar, recalled as a derelict haunt of near-rape. In “this desert at eight-thousand feet” during “this season gold-fleeced,” the poem moves back to myth and forward to the sea, to how “light strikes the breaking wave, / the breaking light of you” before closing with the tercet quoted above. That “breaking light,” once destructive and now redemptive, carries the holy Sophia’s light, the personification of divine wisdom and spirit. The abiding presence of agony and ecstasy brings the birth of wise self-knowledge.
Goett’s poems reverberate with soundings of Gnosticism, Greek myth, Christianity, and in the extraordinary poem “Free Fall,” Buddhism. “Free Fall’s speaker is a “you” who has been “travelling from terminal to terminal, / hoping to be met at the gate” by her father, unavailable now. You must rely on flight attendants and learn from other passengers like the one in front of you whose “tray table presses into your gut.”
These are your teachers, so say the Buddhists,
those gadflies sent to make you grow.
Learn to picnic in a war zone, says the bodhisattva,
strapped in as you are for the convenience
of the attendants who disappear
with your credit card, bring back more snacks
and samples of oblivion. “Free Fall” 12
This familiar, cramped space transforms when the reader learns that “the sluffed cells you left in your mother’s womb // have the power to heal,
each of us restored by the spoke-light of another’s radiance.
Breathe in, breathe out, little galaxy, little bundle of cure. 13
These lines could be the book’s mantra. We suffer our “private madness,” sitting “armrest to armrest . . . life resembling a coffin-suite for contortionists” attached to an “allotment / of recycled air.” Yet, what of this “spoke-light of another’s radiance” or of language itself, with its power to connect and enlighten us? May it offer refuge from the wheel of suffering, or samsara, the Buddhist cycle of birth, death, and rebirth driven by ignorance, craving, and attachment?
In the turbulence, we learn that the pilot bailed out before being voted off the plane, Yoda is now “directing everyone to sing Kumbaya,” and you had choices before booking this flight.
Choose nothing. Refusal is the first stage of passivity. 14
You could bail out and fall from the sky, but now the attendant is asking you to “choose your entrée.” You wanted
to learn something about others’ suffering, your greed?
It seems a glory ago your father met you at the gate.
And you want to be greeted by him,
with all your old cats and dead relatives
feasting at the lambent table, the lucelence of eternity,
so you choose the third option, to endure. 14
Lise Goett’s poems live in that “lucelence,” the luminous lux of The Radiant. The poet has uncovered, plied, and polished it as a visionary form of discovery and healing for the reader.
After a dark tunnel, the difficult body, no longer a “God-struck child,” arrives in its “Palace,” “ravenous as the winter birds for “the last red berries.” Studying them, she sees
a red, bluer and more dull
than Castilian red or carmine—
the color of fall apples
cupped in a porcelain lotus.
The vision unfolds: “I saw first gate, then palace, / then the legendary halls” where “Draped in diadem, / the Spirit hovered—unheavened” in the depth of winter, “homed in spalls of ice . . . .”
Confession heard, absolution granted, alive in the instant:
the sweet, shriven juice of all frost’s shrivings—
fleet, brief—
suddenly made radiant. 64
Heather H. Thomas is the author of Vortex Street, Blue Ruby, and five other poetry collections.Her poems won honors in the 2022 Joy Harjo Prize, the 2014 Rita Dove Prize, from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets. Also published as H.T. Harrison, her work appears in journals and anthologies including The Pasticheur: Literature, Art, & Ideas; Barrow Street; Interim; The Pedestal; The Wallace Stevens Journal; Mizna: Prose, Poetry, Art Exploring Arab America; Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate for Social Justice (Michigan State UP); and Keystone Poetry: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (Penn State UP). Heather has written on Emily Dickinson, H.D., Alice Notley, and Anne Waldman. She is a professor emerita at Kutztown University and lives in Reading, Pennsylvania.