During his residence in Florida in the late 1970s Thompson took a Masters in English Literature at the University of South Florida, submitted some poems as part of an assignment, and was encouraged to publish them. He began to write poetry more intensively, and in 1987 Alan Ross accepted 'Florida' for the
London Magazine. Thompson has subsequently published more than 20 poems in British, US, and Caribbean journals, including
The Caribbean Writer and
The Mississippi Review. His work is represented in
The Heinemann Book of Caribbean Poetry (1992),
A World of Poetry for CXC (1994), several
Observer Arts Magazine anthologies,
The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse (2005), and
Writers Who Paint / Painters Who Write (2007).
He has published two collections of poetry and a verse novel:
- The Denting of a Wave (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, 1992) ISBN 0-948833-62-9
- Moving On (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, 1997) ISBN 1-90075-17-1
- View from Mount Diablo (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, 2003; 2nd, annotated ed., Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, & Tirril: Humanities-Ebooks, 2009) ISBN 1-900715-81-3 (2003) ISBN 978-1-84523-144-6 (2009 paperback) ISBN 978-1-84760-093-6 (2009 digital)
These volumes were all positively reviewed both in local Jamaican publications and in
The Caribbean Review of Books and
The Caribbean Writer. Thompson was encouraged to write
View from Mount Diablo by Derek Walcott, a personal friend, and it won the Jamaican National Literary Prize in manuscript in 2001. It was also warmly praised by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Jamaican-American poet Louis Simpson:
View from Mount Diablo is a remarkable achievement. Its knowledge of the island, the entwining of private lives and politics, lifts Jamaican poetry to a level that has not been attempted before. The poetry is strong, imaginative, fascinating in detail. It describes terrible things with understatement, yet with compassion. I don't think anything could be more harrowing than the rape of Chantal, or the boy begging Alexander to spare his life ... This is narrative poetry at its best.
The verse novel was serialised in
The Gleaner, and the first edition sold more than 300 copies in Jamaica (where average sale of any new paperback is c.70).
A CD of Thompson reading 28 of his poems,
Taking Words for a Walk, was released by the Intermedia Foundation, NY, in 2006. In the liner notes the distinguished Jamaican poet Edward Baugh, who is Professor Emeritus of Caribbean Literature at the University of the West Indies, Mona, says:
Rippling through these poems, nuancing their meaning, is an alertness to class and color distinctions, which grounds the poems in Jamaican social reality and no doubt in the poet's own place in that reality. In "Carpenters," for instance, it matters that peasant Malcolm is "purple black," while the boy is "nearly white." In the sharply, wittily satirical "Pride and Prejudice," the central factor of color consciousness and discrimination operates across cultural boundaries. On a more ominous note are the poems which evoke the sense of social malaise and schism in contemporary Jamaica, a malaise that seems to threaten violent upheaval, poems such as "Vigil," "Death of a Honda Rider," "Jamaican Gothic," "The Garden," and "This New Light".