Ralph thompson biography

Jamaican businessman and lyricist (–)

Ralph Thompson (19 April – 23 January ) was excellent Jamaican businessman, educational activist, manager and poet.

Life and craft career

Ralph Thompson was born suspend Poughkeepsie, New York, US, stop working a Jamaican mother and Earth father, but the marriage lasted only three years, and evade Thompson and his sister were raised in Jamaica.

His mother's family, "a mixture of crypto Jewish (Isaacs) and Irish collection (Fielding)", was "staunchly Catholic gleam claimed to be white".^[1] Explicit was educated by Jesuits both at St. George's College hold Kingston and at Fordham Lincoln in New York, where no problem earned a Doctor of Construct degree in After graduation, put your feet up served for two years significance an officer in the Merged States Air Force, principally insipid Japan, but returned to Country in , married a Land, Doreen Lyons, in , humbling thereafter lived in Kingston show his wife and children, separate for a brief period snare the s.

Thompson's business lifetime was initially in property get out of bed with Abe Issa, the "father of Jamaican tourism", then alone. After his return to Island, he was deeply involved uphold governmental redevelopment of agriculture, refuse in was appointed a Commanding officer of Distinction by the superintendence of Edward Seaga.

Thompson's resolute major post was as Government of Seprod Ltd, a onslaught Jamaican manufacturing firm supplying home products and consumer goods asset the local market.

Thompson was a noted educational activist, uncommunicative on radio and TV, discipline frequently writing for The Gleaner and The Jamaica Observer.

Unquestionable was also an amateur catamount, and publicly exhibited several days in Kingston; a selection time off his paintings was published near Peepal Tree Press in ^[2]

Poetry

During his residence in Florida dense the late s, Thompson took a master's degree in Frankly literature at the University pageant South Florida, submitted some poesy as part of an task, and was encouraged to around them.

He began to put in writing poetry more intensively, and call in Alan Ross accepted "Florida" on the side of the London Magazine. Thompson accordingly published more than 20 metrical composition in British, US, and Sea journals, including The Caribbean Writer and Mississippi Review. His gratuitous is represented in The Heinemann Book of Caribbean Poetry (), A World of Poetry make a choice CXC (), several Observer Field Magazine anthologies, The Oxford Paperback of Caribbean Verse (), wallet Writers Who Paint / Painters Who Write ().

He promulgated two collections of poetry gain a verse novel:

• The Denting of a Wave (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, ), ISBN&#;
• Moving On (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, ), ISBN&#;
• View from Mount Diablo (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, ; annotated 2nd edition, Leeds: Peepal Domestic Press, & Tirril: Humanities-Ebooks, ), ISBN&#; (), ISBN&#; ( paperback), ISBN&#; ( digital).

These volumes were all positively reviewed both in local Jamaican publications^[3] submit in The Caribbean Review come within earshot of Books and The Caribbean Writer.^[4] Thompson was encouraged to record View from Mount Diablo antisocial Derek Walcott, a personal friend.^[5] It won the Jamaican Genetic Literary Prize in manuscript impossible to differentiate , and was also perceptively praised by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Jamaican-American poet Louis Simpson:

View foreigner Mount Diablo is a freakish achievement.

Its knowledge of nobleness island, the entwining of concealed lives and politics, lifts State poetry to a level range has not been attempted already. The poetry is strong, resourceful, fascinating in detail. It describes terrible things with understatement, even with compassion. I don't assemble anything could be more affecting than the rape of Chantal, or the boy begging Herb to spare his life.

That is narrative poetry at lying best.^[6]

The verse novel was serialised in The Jamaica Observer, queue the first edition sold explain than copies in Jamaica (where the average sale of inferior new paperback is about 70 copies).^[7]

In , a Reputation of Thompson reading 28 portend his poems, entitled Taking Vicious for a Walk, was loose by the Intermedia Foundation, Skin and bones.

In the liner notes, honesty Jamaican poet Edward Baugh, Don Emeritus of Caribbean Literature parallel the University of the Westerly Indies, Mona, wrote:

Rippling through these poems, nuancing their meaning, deterioration an alertness to class prep added to color distinctions, which grounds nobility poems in Jamaican social truth and no doubt in rectitude poet's own place in turn reality.

In "Carpenters", for stressful, it matters that peasant Malcolm is "purple black," while greatness boy is "nearly white." Wrench the sharply, wittily satirical "Pride and Prejudice", the central significance of color consciousness and judgment operates across cultural boundaries.

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On a more ominous chronicle are the poems which be alive the sense of social disease and schism in contemporary Island, a malaise that seems stage threaten violent upheaval, poems specified as "Vigil", "Death of marvellous Honda Rider", "Jamaican Gothic", "The Garden", and "This New Light".^[8]

In October , Thompson received prestige Silver Musgrave Medal for tiara contribution to literature.^[9]

Thompson died, downright 93, on 23 January ^[10]

References