by Rosemary Brown
In the Settlers Book Club, we read Jesse Thistle’s second book Scars and Stars. This collection of prose poems is a very accessible and moving read.
Scars reference the damage Jesse did to his Achilles heel in an incident described in his previous book. He still experiences physical and emotional pain and states that for him poetry serves as a healing tool. He views it as an “Achilles shield” through which he can “create the world anew”. Stars, on the other hand, represent “moments of beauty that can illuminate the scars”.
He divides the book into thematic sections with evocative titles: A Private War, Show Me Your Scars, Love Letters from Rehab, Forgotten Tobacco, and Someone’s Ancestors. Each section starts with an introduction explaining what the section is about and in the process shares aspects of his life not included in his first book.
He dedicates each section to different people in his life: family, street workers, neighbours, rehab staff, and recovering addicts. Some of the poems which stood out for me included “The Suit”, referring to the often threadbare and out of fashion suits that released prisoners wear upon re-entering life outside prison; and “The Convict’s Braid”. At first, I thought the braid referred to hair, but he was talking about convicts braiding sheets into ropes. Then there’s “Passport”, describing how drug dealers spot undercover cops by the lack of scars on the bottoms of their feet. Very poignant was “Please Remember My Name”, referring to the silencing of identity while in prison. “St. Stella” is about the paramedic who recognized him when he was on the street and took him home for a shower and a meal and offered a roof over his head for the night.
Sometimes it was single lines of poetry that stood out for me. In “Christopher” he describes looking into the eyes of someone with “black, vacant pupils right down to the ocean floor. “Labour of Love” tenderly expresses his very deep feelings for his wife “Lucie”.
One phrase that struck several of us in the book club was: “What matters is the quality of the heart, rather than quality of the mind”. In “Reciprocal Onion” he recounts wisdom shared by his auntie Maria Campbell.
In the last section, Someone’s Ancestors, Thistle ends with poems about domestic life and parenthood.
In the video we watched, Thistle said that his first book, From the Ashes, was written based on the senses; that it was empirical in approach. In contrast, he wrote the poems in Scars and Stars from the heart. Jesse has a very generous one: besides teaching as an associate professor in the Department of Humanities at York University in Toronto, he advocates for the unhoused.
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