Girls Who Dream Me

Beryl Baigent is a poet; her published collections include Absorbing the
Dark, Hiraeth: In Search of Celtic Origins, Triptych: Virgins, Victims,
Votives, and Mystic Animals.

Beth Goobie won the Pat Lowther Award in 1995 for her first book of
poetry, Scars of Light. In Girls Who Dream Me, she continues to draw on
own personal experiences in exploring childhood and adolescence.

This poet opts for the long-line poem, which gives her work a narrative
flavor and carries the reader on to the next poem or chapter in the
story. Goobie’s imagery permeates her poems with a mystical
sensibility as she favors nature as a metaphor for sexual and sensual
feelings. In the opening poem, “waiting for the gods,” the poet
describes an erotic encounter as “the moon a full tongue licking
ripples in skin.” “[A] birthing hymn” aligns the newly born with
celestial bodies: “think of the stars that glow in the brain, / the
planets that suspend, full and heavy, silent as organs through you.”
In “sometimes,” the protagonist is a girl with a flock of
butterflies rising “from her bones” who “bursts into a black horse
galloping” or “sometimes narrows into the intent of the asp.”

Goobie’s imagery is unique and alive. Referring to students at their
desks in school, she notes “boys splayed out from the groins, as if
some sweet code / played itself there, the rest of the body danced to
it.” The girls sat “differently.” They were “careful to rise
quiet into the swell / of [their] breasts, painted [themselves] into
pastel landscapes for the boys / to admire.”

Give yourself time to read every succulent word in these 33
well-crafted poems. You will benefit from the poet’s sentient
connection with the cosmos and perhaps thereafter perceive the world,
and yourself, with new eyes.