John O. Thompson

These irreverent, sometimes brash and often learned poems, full of horse sense and perhaps a kind of divine folly, are completely resistant to gloss and speak to a community of readers soured on old forms and yet unattached to new ones.

Thompson examines a cornucopia of topics, but each poem probes one of life’s truths. What distinguishes Thompson’s poems is his sense of play, as is evidenced by a few of the titles, including that of this collection, The Gates of Even. With a kind of mathematical precision they move from the odd to the even. Many of the poems in this collection plumb the depths of existential angst with bracing humor and brio. John O. Thompson is a singular poet willing to follow his own path, a jazz philosopher improvising on the small truths he finds along the way.

John O. Thompson (who needs his O. because of all the other John Thompsons in the world) was born in Toronto in 1947 and grew up just outside Millet, Alberta. Since 1969 he has lived in the UK, mainly Liverpool and London, where he has lectured on film and media studies. He is co-author, with Ann Thompson, of Shakespeare, Meaning and Metaphor, and he co-edited, with the late Antony Easthope, Contemporary Poetry Meets Modern Theory. He is the author of Three [1/3 of, with Jon Whyte and Charles Noble], and Echo and Montana.