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The much-loved, yet undervalued, final book of poems by British-Canadian poet John Thompson, is reissued in a handsome edition, featuring a new introduction by Rob Winger.
Originally published in 1978, Stilt Jack is a series of powerful soliloquies on the complexity of love and the process of living. These are made immediate through Thompson’s command of metaphor, his eye for the New Brunswick landscape, his intense, often elliptical way of transfiguring everyday things into shorthand symbols of reality. This remarkable sequence of poems is based on the ghazal, an ancient Persian poetic form which is discussed in Thompson’s introduction to the original edition of the book.
These poems more than fulfill the promise of Thompson’s first collection, At the Edge of the Chopping There Are No Secrets. Stilt Jack is the last testament of a major poet at the pinnacle of his craft.
“In the last years of his life, apparently, John Thompson craved a poetry of extremis, of damnation. That implacable mystique has taken hold of poets from Baudelaire to John Berryman; Thompson’s surrender to it, in Stilt Jack, is an arresting performance of the part. And a deeply troubling one.” — Dennis Lee
“A world of essence, primitive and chaotic, made of earth, air, fire, and waters . . . spilt blood, split woods; cries, horses, fish; Anabasis half begun, half finished in the New Brunswick woods . . . Poetry so unique as to be beyond ‘originality.” — A.J.M. Smith