John Thompson: Collected Poems and Translations

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

When John Thompson died at the age of 38 in 1976, he had published one
volume of poems, At the Edge of the Chopping There Are No Secrets
(1973). Stilt Jack appeared posthumously in 1978. Though these two
volumes were reprinted as I Dream Myself into Being: Collected Poems
(1991), edited by James Polk, no attempt was made to track down material
that had appeared only in magazines or existed solely in manuscript. As
Peter Sanger notes with justifiable pride in his foreword, the present
book “more than doubles the amount of John Thompson’s work
previously collected.” Moreover, the new material is not confined to
stray “minor” work: it includes valuable sets of translations,
especially those from René Char, but also select translations from the
Québécois writers Roland Giguиre and Paul-Marie Lapointe.

Thompson is not an easy poet to assimilate. Most readily accessible,
perhaps, are the poems that vividly evoke images of the Maritimes,
particularly the landscape and life of the Tantramar marshes. But
Thompson was also a widely read and deeply allusive poet; his verse is
full of echoes and recallings of the Bible, Dante, Shakespeare, Blake,
Hopkins, Yeats, Lowry, Roethke, and many others. Initially, his poems
may give a somewhat baffling impression of vague meanings interspersed
with clear resonance, and readers must be prepared to make imaginative,
intellectual, and even syntactical leaps that are by no means obvious.
If they persevere, however, the rewards are considerable.

Sanger provides ample help through his loving and careful editing and
his excellent biographical introduction. His concise notes are both
textually and critically helpful, though I wish he had included more of
the annotations to Stilt Jack originally offered in his pamphlet Sea Run
(1986). But his main contribution has been to make the whole of this
poetry available. Thompson’s work is already highly regarded in the
Maritimes; now that it can be seen in its entirety, there is no excuse
for its being neglected in the rest of Canada.