Search results for ""author ralph thompson""

Professor Mervyn Morris, Jamaica’s Poet Laureate writes: 'Ralph Thompson’s luminous autobiography is a fascinating portrait. A witty businessman and poet who studied in the United States and served as an Air Force lawyer in Japan, he writes vividly about family and his Jamaican formation, changes in racial climate, vicissitudes in business and public service; about painting, poetry, love and betrayals. Critical and self-critical, he is a man of conscience trying to understand.'Take My Word For It offers rich insights into the long and full life of one of one of Jamaica's finest poets who has also been at the heart of the island's economic and commercial development. There are moving and sometimes comic chapters of a pre-war boyhood in colonial Jamaica in a far from prosperous white and Catholic Jamaican family, the years spent at the Jesuit college of Fordham in the USA, and postwar service in the United States Airforce, serving in Japan. Thereafter Ralph Thompson tells the story of a life at the heart of Jamaica's development of tourism, capitalist modernity and the leadership of Seprod, one of the island's largest companies. There are fascinating glimpses of involvement with Jamaica's sharply divided political life -- between Michael Manley and Edward Seaga. But along with the businessman who can convey something of the excitement of commercial strategy and take-over bids, there is also the artist and poet who has explored the inner life, not least the position of a white man in a Jamaica whose decolonisation has been in part about discovering its black identity. Ralph Thompson has long had a passionate concern with the quality of the education on offer to all Jamaicans, and he writes with feeling about his contribution to the debate around educational issues and practical attempts to make improvements. There is also the loyal supporter of Derek Walcott's Trinidad Theatre Workshop who did much to bring that theatre to wider Caribbean and American notice, who writes about his friendship with Walcott with warmth and insight.Amply illustrated with photographs, images of Thompson's paintings and extracts from his poetry, Take My Word For It is a beautifully and frankly written record of a significant Jamaican life.Contains 19 illustrations/photographs, 12 in full colour.

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Rich in image, sonority and wit, Ralph Thompson's poems are the fruits of a maturity which has learned to confront the facts of life and death with both exuberance and dread. Humane and finely crafted, his poems are firmly rooted in Caribbean particularity, but are universal in their concerns. He has the story-teller's gift which grips, then leaves the reader pondering on the subtleties beneath the surface. This collection will establish him as a serious voice in West Indian poetry."First rate poetry... intelligent and gifted with a sense of humour."Louis Simpson, The Caribbean Review of BooksRalph Thompson is a Jamaican poet. He paints as seriously as he writes poetry. His work has been published in a number of journals, including The London Magazine. He was the Senior Executive of one of his country's biggest companies.

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A crime-novel in verse, View from Mount Diablo explores the transformation of Jamaica from a sleepy colonial society to a post-colonial nation where political corruption, drug wars, and avenging authorities have made life hell. The resentments class and racial privilege provoke underscore both the turmoil in society and the relationships at the heart of the narrative, between Adam Cole, a dreamy white boy driven by personal tragedy to crusading journalism, squint-eyed Nellie Simpson, once a servant, then a political enforcer, and stuttering Nathan, gardener and groom turned cocaine baron. Beyond this trio is a dazzling array of real and fictitious characters including Bustamante, coke-trade middleman Tony Blake, the informer Blaka, who finds religion, a corrupt plantation owner, and a murderous police officer. In a time when 'Blood / cheaper than drugs', View from Mount Diablo asserts the power of art to tell the truth, to use form and selection of incident to shape unmanageable circumstance into meaningful narrative, and touch the heart to stir the citizen to action. Rich with religious implication, this is a prophetic work of exasperated love, abandoning the softening light of 'an old romantic view' for a 'harsh, uncompromising glare' and blending lyrical narrative with wrenching tragedy.View from Mount Diablo won the 2001 Jamaican National Literary Award.Ralph Thompson is a Jamaican. He paints as seriously as he writes poetry. His work has been published in a number of journals, including the London Magazine. He was the Senior Executive of one of his country's biggest companies.

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The poems in Moving On recreate moments of change, loss and epiphany. There are vivid glimpses of a pre-war Jamaican childhood - of sexual discovery under a billiard table and of the rude ingratitude of a goat saved from dissection in the school biology lab. The long sequence, 'Goodbye Aristotle, So Long America', explores the years of study at a Jesuit university in America and the making both of a lifetime's values and of the sense of irony which has made it possible to live with them.Other poems reflect on the experience of ageing, of increasing vulnerability, but also of an increased appreciation for what sustains human relationships through time.Jamaica is present in these poems as a place of aching natural beauty, but whose violent human energies can only be viewed with an ambivalent love and fear, where: 'In the city's bursting funeral parlours/ the corpses glow at night, nimbus of blue/ acetylene burning the darkness under the roof,/ lighting the windows - crunch of bone and sinew/ as a foot curls into a cloven hoof.'"It is exquisite poetry throughout. Images of 'the sun turning cynical', 'the ocean, washing colonial guilt/like seaweed from an unrepentant beach', of 'albino hawks' and 'a black Clint Eastwood' mocking; of 'an awning pulled up like the lid/of an eye afraid to blink' and of 'the lip of the sea and the lip of the sky/zip-locked the horizon' are pure art. Moving On is a feast."Sheila Garcia-Bisnott, The Weekly Gleaner.Ralph Thompson is a Jamaican. He paints as seriously as he writes poetry. His work has been published in a number of journals, including The London Magazine. He was the Senior Executive of one of his country's biggest companies.

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The poems in this collection display a remarkable energy from a writer now in his eighties: effortlessly exploring the grand themes of ambition, rebellion, innocence lost, memory, love and death. The selected poems, some significantly revised, retain their original lustre and now enter into rewarding dialogue with a range of new works - tough in their honesty, witty in their insights, and universal in their appeal.Hailed as a "superb craftsman" by the Routledge Encyclopaedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English, Thompson is at home in many forms: free verse, rhymed quatrains, haiku and villanelles – in patois or standard English. The centrepiece of the new work is a long poem, 'The Colour of Conscience', which explores the dynamics, personal and social, of being a white poet in a black country.Ralph Thompson is a leading Jamaican poet. His most recent collection, View from Mount Diablo (Peepal Tree Press, 2009, 2nd ed.), won the 2001 Jamaican National Literary Competition and was hailed as "a remarkable achievement" by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Louis Simpson. His work has been published in many international journals, including The London Magazine, as well as The Heinemann Book of Caribbean Poetry (1992) and The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse (2009).

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