Pam Thompson, "Sub/urban Legends"

 

Pam Thompson is a writer, educator and reviewer based in Leicester. She has been widely published in magazines including Atrium, Butcher’s Dog, Finished Creatures,The Alchemy Spoon, The High Window, Ink, Sweat & Tears, The North, The Rialto, Magma and Mslexia.  Pam’s last collection, Strange Fashion, was published by Pindrop Press in 2017. A pamphlet, Sub/urban Legends has just been published Paper Swans Press (March 2025). Pam is a Hawthornden Fellow.

About Sub/urban Legends, by Pam Thompson
These poems cross and re-cross boundaries between the real and surreal and take imaginative leaps in form and subject matter. The New York School poets are presiding spirits and Eduard Munch puts in an appearance in a Welsh town. The poems don’t shy away from the darker side of life: loss, grief, mental illness, but there is joy and exuberance and hope. 

You can read more about Sub/urban Legends on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two poems from the collection. 

From Sub/urban Legends

In New York City with my daughter

Outside the Whitney, a man sells red roses.

Mother’s Day. Inside, Berdie, Larry Rivers’ mother-in-law

is naked, twice. Every wrinkle and fold. After she died

O’Hara wrote, ‘Berdie, Berdie, where are you

and why?’ Schuyler loved her too.

On Brooklyn Bridge a cyclist shouts at a woman

who has wandered across his lane.

I turn to catch the views Georgia painted, read messages 

on love-locks chained to the rails, ‘I love you

Jay, Carina, Kim.’ Black heart drawn with a Sharpie.

Times Square—two living-statues of Liberty,

bickering through green rubber masks. Rap 

boys pull out stooges from Asia, Australia, the UK—

all brag and swagger, leap over them. Our cameras

OD on light—we lose our bearings, just by looking up.

The Glass Strawberry 

My friend sent his boyfriend a single rose for Valentine’s Day.

It arrived with its head cut off. His boyfriend bought 

him three cacti and put them on a fold-up table

which collapsed which is bizarre because it reminds me

of my daughter’s early Christmas present: three small cacti,

packed flat and posted, wearing woolly hats and scarves.

My cacti lean together in the kitchen window.

My friend sends people care-packages when they’re ill.

I told him I’d read about ‘strawberries,’ little treats 

we should give ourselves when we’re sad, sitting in the sun, 

or stroking a cat, to boost our endorphins.

A homeless man he worked with called them ‘dolphins.’ 

My friend sent me a glass strawberry that’s cool

and slightly spiky. I like to hold it but the glass heart 

with severed arteries stays in its red satin box. 

We have both been in the desert for ages 

but our cacti have pink flowers, are taller than us 

and hold out their arms. And the dolphins leap and leap.

Pam Thompson, "Strange Fashion"

Pam Thompson is a writer and lecturer based in Leicester. Her publications include The Japan Quiz (Redbeck Press, 2009) and Show Date and Time (Smith | Doorstop, 2006). Pam has a PhD in Creative Writing and her second collection, Strange Fashion, was published by Pindrop Press in 2017. Pam is a 2019 Hawthornden Fellow. She is on Twitter @fierydes

About Strange Fashion

Pam Thompson’s second collection bursts with strangers and with intimates, with colour and with cool dispassion; these poems travel the world and through history from the Belfast Troubles to slave smuggling in Illinois, from out-of-season Alicante to a croft in the Scottish Highlands, to parachuting from the St. Louis Gateway Arch. They take us into the worlds of artists via the imagined lives of assistant to Louis Daguerre or Georgia O’Keeffe, and sail confidently out into the fantastical: witness Emily Brontë and Emily Dickinson hunting for antiques in Church Stretton or the journalist trying to winkle tidbits from Virginia Woolf in an elevator.

You can read more about Strange Fashion on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From Strange Fashion, by Pam Thompson

Shifts

(i.m Mildred Thompson 1919-2015)

That night, I was too young
To understand why she cried
on hearing Kennedy had been shot.
She brought the smell 
of methylated spirits in with the cold.

I outgrew my Raleigh bike.
She bumped it along the path
next to the railway line,
her dress, starched cuffs and collar,
stashed in the wicker basket on the front.

Coal trucks rattled past to Keresley.
She’d walked when the past was icy,
Slipped on a stile, cracked two ribs,
Wouldn’t stay put on the settee, was up
to cook our tea, make beds.

At ninety-three she understood
if the traffic held them up. I used to be
a State Registered Nurse, she’d inform
the girls who found her combs,
changed her sheets, wrote up
their notes leaning against 
the fridge. The social worker spoke
as if she couldn’t understand English.
My God – that tone – I used to be …

That January evening in the care home,
they brought us cups of tea.
She was making her way back,
and if the paths and corridors were slippery
it didn’t matter. There was nothing
to climb over, no shift to report for.

The Shipyard Apprentice

(i.m. George Thompson 1914-82)
                           
             Fourteen. Your first day.
The old ones spoke about the Titanic;
the space it took, how it reared above 
terraced houses. When you dared a smoke 
in the dry dock, you could almost hear 
women laughing, a crack of glass 
against steel, glimpse taffeta, crèpe de Chine.

              Youse’ll be safe here 
when we kick those bastards out.

Taigs. New name in your mouth.
Theirs, the worst job—
painting hulls with ‘monkey-dung.’
It floated like dirty snowflakes.
You could taste it, feel it lining your lungs.

             Dusk. Swaying on a tram 
to the shut-down shop on Sandyrow 
where shoes lay on racks, heels still unmended. 
She’d seemed well when you left.
The invasion of neighbours. This, then the war; 
no-one to straighten your lapels for either.