Waiting for the Paraclete

Waiting for the Paraclete by Lise Goett. Beacon Press, 66 pp., $15.00. Modern writers often maintain that living essentially consists of unfulfilled "waiting." With the title of her first collection, Goett more specifically (and earnestly) designates the object of this inexorable "waiting" than does, say, Samuel Beckett's at once polysemous and meaningless "Godot"; the New-Testament Parakletos is the "intercessor" or "comforter" whom Christ promises to send to his disciples after his departure.

"Paraclete" indeed suggests here a "comforter"--a descending "Holy Spirit" or a mere human--who could assuage the wounds of passion. As Goett roams from "somewhere in Wisconsin" to Paris ("the city where you have spent enough time/for each cell to be replaced in the body"), she examines failed love, sexual yearning, but also mystical aspiration. Refreshingly, the stories of amorous attractions and departures are not exclusively about herself. Sometimes the French le corps--"the body" as opposed to "my body"--echoes in her diction, underscoring the body's estrangement from the mind. Goett's poetry is informed by this persistent dilemma; at her best, she founds her writing on the paradox, or contradiction, that the mind must nevertheless speak for the body, and vice versa. While chronicling action, she is thereby no straightforward raconteuse, but rather one who has reflected on necessary detours and shortcuts--the veracities and mendacities--of all storytelling. Composed in various styles, her poems often intr iguingly mix the abstract quest, the mysterious symbol, the oblique perspective, and the concrete fact. A few lose intensity, however. "1933," for instance, movingly evokes her mother's freshman-year love for "a writer of talent." The poem grippingly builds toward the young man's suicide, before concluding weakly with "Every year, the Ohio River / rises, claiming the body of another Tom Scott." But Waiting for the Paraclete is, overall, a promising collection, revealing a sensibility bent on probing deep.

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