The Girls Who Dream Me

Beth Goobie

Pedlar Press, 1999

Review: paulo da costa

I know of no other Canadian poet who has so bravely surveyed the tumultuous adolescent experience and the accompanying sexual intensity of those explosive years. This book takes us to a time where the centre of the universe is some unclear point between the thighs and where school, in Goobie's words, becomes a " (…) class of teens riding their genitals like a bookmark."

Goobie's fearless incursion into the back seat of cars, church pews, math class desks, holds the mirror through a full spectrum of light and dark in each day. She captures the sensuality, the fire, which adults continuously attempt to dampen with their "warnings of apocalypse and evil".

(…) so i kept my secret hidden from them.

those young boy's hands always touched

the wound i walked around, brought it to full wet cum

under streetlights raining on city pavement,

tight-kneed in a math class desk, rocking

on the cold varnish of an easter church pew.

thoughts of his hands, fingertipped with

abandon slid between my braided thighs.

that pale blur never rested. touching it healed

the flesh i was born true to, girl wild

as the hands and cock of boy, freed

against all the advice, bitterness of the old.

Goobie also tenderly explores that other part of the self that is present in adolescence. We hear such tenderness in "The Other Girl", " (…) the other girl sucked her thumb, she had bucked teeth too…" the self who wavers on the edge of child and adult. "(…) I watched her touch her swelling breasts, their ache (…)

In The Girls Who Dream Me she reminds us of our adolescent moods, fires, distortions which later on we seem most willing to forget or file in the recesses of the mind, the recesses of the body, and never to be revisited. Unabashedly she speaks through the conflicting rules of a Christian culture and to the ebullient desires under the skin.

"(…) and where did my knees go anyway? (…) lost somewhere beyond/ the moan of my mouth, (…) here, no mrs. friesen saying, now we'll open/ to revelations chapter thirteen. Jesus would be alright/ with this glory here on earth, you didn't/ have to die for it you didn't even have to wait,/ just live a little closer to the flesh, knees/ wide wide open as mrs. friesen's apocalyptic mouth."

Goobie is a brave talented poet. Summon up your courage and hear the unswayable said.

©paulodacosta

©paulodacosta