Rooms by Marvin Thompson
Poetry Book Society Recommendation Winter 2026
Peepal Tree Press
Published 1st October 2026.
In writing his first collection, Road Trip, Marvin Thompson recollects that he ‘penned fictions’. In Rooms, there are stories, but here the observant, quizzical gaze is turned upon himself. Rooms collect and contain physical remembrances from all periods of a life: in Thompson’s case the memories of a Black Jamaican London childhood that contained the killing of Cynthia Jarrett and Joy Gardner; of Black sporting heroes; of a difficult relationship with his father in the context of the mostly loving relationship of his parents; the accumulation of music and films that bring some sense of cultural identity, with recurrent references to jazz; a present as a divorced father in Wales who is trying to forge a different kind of relationship with his Mixed-Race children from that with his own father, and not always succeeding; a hoped-for future of finding love again that falters in an on-off relationship, with regretfully wry images of self-sabotage. But rooms can never keep away the world outside, and the poems of personal confession find deeper resonances in Thompson’s keen sense of the given past: of enslavement and the heads of rebel slaves on poles in Montego Bay, of the colonial poverty that drove emigration, of the trials of migrancy and the casual and not so casual racism encountered. These are intensely human poems, rich in their emotional openness, but they are much more than that, because each poem has, within a regular framework of linear shape, a rich musicality of rhyme, assonance and rhythmic patterning, so that each poem is a room that contains its own harmonious arrangement – as does the collection as a whole. Reflecting on the elements of a life both striking and ordinary, Marvin Thompson creates poems of extraordinary grace, wit and elegance.
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