Geoffrey O’Brien’s Who Goes There is reviewed by Joseph Donahue in Restless Messenger: Poetry in Review.
The interrogative of the title alerts us, yes, to “who” goes there, but also, given the poet involved in the asking, to the puzzle of where this “there” might be. Where, we ask, all our life long, is that “there,” the one into which people, places, and all that happens, goes? Each poem in Who Goes There, touches upon a single anxious paradox: what can we know of our not knowing, a not knowing that rests on the rational edge of mysticism, which is to say, ignorance, close to, but ostensibly declining, a mystical unknowing?
