Only thirty-eight years old, the tortured poet John Thompson died in Sackville, New Brunswick, in 1976. His second book of poetry, the scarcely finished Stilt Jack, was published two years later. It has been deemed a minor Canadian classic—the kind of book that, in a more just or literate world, would be hailed as a national treasure. It has also been taken to suggest that Thompson—by all accounts, an alcoholic—was so in love with death that the coroner was wrong to rule his demise an accident.
The first of thirty-eight ghazals in Stilt Jack establishes the dismal mood: “Now you have burned your books: you’ll go / with nothing but your blind, stupefied heart.” In an essay on Thompson, poet, critic, and journalist Michael Lista writes that Stilt Jack “opens with a tone any barfly will recognize, the self-admonishing second person of your conscience telling you that you’re ruined.” Seemingly innocuous, that same word—barfly—reappears as the title of Lista’s disturbing new volume of poetry.
