Luke Thompson – författare

Cornwall is steeped in poetry, legend and storytelling. Join Luke Thompson on a literary tour around its dramatic coastline, its cliffs and coves, across the moor and down the mines.Meet Cornish poets such as Jack Clemo and Charles Causley, enjoy retellings of thrilling legends and stirring songs and read inspiring fiction and non-fiction from famous Cornish writers and residents including Daphne du Maurier, Thomas Hardy, Winston Graham and D. H. Lawrence. What each and every one has in common is a deep-rooted connection to a county defined by its awe-inspiring and varied landscape, its folklore and its fiercely independent people.Treasures of Cornwall: A Literary Anthology is edited by Luke Thompson.

What do the longest-serving Canadian Prime Minister and a ketamine-injecting psychonaut have in common? What would a poltergeist mongoose say if you spoke to him on a Ouija board? Would talking spiders be more believable if they had lips? Theseare some of the important questions Luke Thompson seeks to answer in this exploration of human-animal conversation.Spanning the ancient and modern, the scientific and the strange, Thompson's journey takes him from the stories of King Solomon and Doctor Dolittle to medieval dragon-slayers and extraterrestrial aliens, via Harvard laboratories, pet psychics, and the discipline of anthrozoology.Always eccentric and always fascinating, Domadomadoma-Blumblumblum sees Thompson navigate these peculiar landscapes - whether lowering himself into a flotation tank or training as a pet psychic - with many questions on his mind: What exactly do we want from conversations with our fellow animals? What portrait of the world do we paint when we envisage these communications? And how far are we willing to go to realise this dream?

Did you hear about the Redruth girl who vomited snails? Or how the saint of Gunwalloe saved his sister’s eye from a goose? Can you cure warts with a slug, or whooping cough with spiders?Sea serpents and bear-dogs, giant birds and bigfoots, devil-fish and sea ghosts – these are the beasts that haunt the landscape of Cornwall. In this book of bizarre beasts you’ll find familiar faunal favourites like the red-eyed Owlman of Mawnan Smith and the Beast of Bodmin Moor as well as Camborne’s Frog King and Ladock’s feathered fiend, plagues of flies and octopuses and shoals of Holy fish. You’ll find beavers and boars, rhymes for curing adder bites and the reason we feed pasties to snails.This compendium of Cornwall’s most curious creatures brings together stories from natural history and folklore, broadside ballads and news reports, celebrating the wonderful stories we share with the animals around us.

Singing About Melon opens with a call for silence: 'Silenzio'. This is the self-defeating shout of the guards in the Basilica of St Francis in Assisi, where several of the poems are placed. It is a call that echoes through Luke Thompson's first collection, playing with sense and nonsense, the sayable and the unsayable, as well as the saying that un-says.Eels, anchorites, parrots, invertebrates, a ventriloquist's dummy and a mechanical squirrel are all deployed in this exploration of sense and silence through themes of bodily identity, grief, the divine and other species. "A rare book - both strange and exhilarating; poems which bore and drill into the reader's mind much like the earthworms, eels and other tiny guests vibrating on the pages." --Mona Arshi. "Skilfully precise and playfully mischievous, these poems embrace the spiritual, the cartoonish and everything in between with a mindful sensibility." --Isabel Galleymore