A few weeks ago I read and reviewed Bryan Trottier’s memoir, All Roads Home: A Life On and Off the Ice, which had this fantastic forward by the Saskatchewanian author Jesse Thistle.
The thoughtful and gracious way that Thistle introduced Trottier’s work to the world was so striking that I rushed to pick up Thistle’s hot-off-the-press poetry collection Scars and Stars for my next read. In a word, this book is stellar.
Scars and Stars chronicles Thistle’s personal journey through homelessness, addiction, recovery, and later academia and fatherhood with great pride and specific attention to moments of intimacy, learning, and joy.
This poetry collection feels wide awake, the product of a racing mind that stretches across time and space to weave together a collection of poems that each contribute their own snapshot of his life.
Certainly an extension of Thistle’s memoir, the Canada Reads nominated work From the Ashes, this poetry collection feels like the stars to the scars that Thistle shared with readers in his memoir. Scattered throughout with delightful turns of phrase or little rhymes that I would be repeating in my head all day, like (most
obviously) scars and stars or sprigs and twigs, Thistle’s poetry collection nonetheless accompanies these moments of levity with moments of weight and reflection.
There is such an intense amount of care that Thistle pours into all of his work that you can almost feel it through the pages in the way that each sentence is formatted and every word is placed. While Thistle’s writing is consistently thoughtful and clever, what resonated most about this poetry collection was his tale of love, addiction, and rehabilitation that goes soul-deep.
Thistle’s work is ultimately a hopeful reflection on his life as well as the subtle ways that his pain wasn’t able to stop him from growing or learning. For example, he sustained a significant injury to his Achilles tendon that left him with a limp as well as an interest in marathon running and a fascination with the mythological ancient Greek character Achilles (after whom the tendon was named). It is this second outcome of his injury that he uses to contextualise his life through poetry.
Scars and Stars returns again and again to ancient and mythologized figures from history and uses their stories to tell Thistle’s own. Though his poem “Dust” reflects on how, in a few hundred years, no one will have an inkling that any of us existed as individuals, Thistle’s continuous reflections on the great artists, leaders and
heroes of the ancient world suggests that maybe some of us have a chance for our names to last through time. Thistle has certainly cemented himself as one of the great writers of our time — in reflecting on his experiences of homelessness, fatherhood, and addiction recovery through the language of mythology and ancient history, Thistle’s poems artfully bring thousands of years of history and storytelling close to home.