Publication November 1st 2008
Frances Corkey Thompson is Irish, and lives in Devon. She performs regularly in Arts Centres and festivals, at home and abroad.
Her range is impressive. In this short first collection she moves, with precise sure-footedness, through the full emotional range - from sheer fun to arresting (and sometimes shocking) poignancy. Influenced in her work as much by early memories as by adult concerns, she stirs to the music of language: her writing sings. And she has the rare ability to say a complex thing simply - one of the hardest things in the world.
'Amidst the personalities and ballyhoo of the contemporary scene, Frances Thompson has simply and quietly been getting on with the poet's real business of writing one decent poem after another.... Spell it out: these well-crafted poems are a pleasure to read.' Andy Brown
The Safe Places
They are places of danger,
all of them. Even here
on the homeward path where the road forks
making a triangle out of Nowhere
you could be lured by tall unkindly irises
to fall and drown.
In the woods where bluebells
hide the beetle and the hedgehog
we stand by the mouse-grey stream
where they have put up barbed wire
so that even here it is safe no longer.
Turn. Look on the wrong side.
The safest place is not where I said.
The child knew and she has kept the secret.
One day I will find you.
Frances Thompson
