Scars of Light

Lisa A. Dickson is a freelance writer living in Guelph, Ontario.

Scars of Light is an autobiographical enactment of remembering, a search
in the landscapes of childhood for the fractured self. The opening poems
in the collection are filled with flights from the body. Here survival
of sexual abuse “means the self must come apart into selves: / like a
deck of cards ...” (“knowledge”). These poems that depict the
churchgoing family and children’s games contain within them traces of
the other biography—the scenes of abuse that lie waiting in the centre
of the book. Here the forgotten horror erupts with devastating clarity
in poems like “the star girl” and “memory code.” And yet there
is healing too, as the multiple Beths are knitted together in both the
act and the products of writing.

Words like “powerful,” “necessary,” or “important” ring
with the hollowness of platitudes in the face of Goodie’s relentless
and yet matter-of-fact exploration of the power-to, the power-over, and
the powerless. This collection offers us no platitudes, and demands
none.