Don Thompson is a native of the San Joaquin Valley where he has remained most of his life. He has been writing about the region for over fifty years, publishing a dozen or so books and chapbooks. Back Roads: A Journal won the 2008 Sunken Garden Prize. A book-length historical narrative poem, Local Color, is available from Aldrich Press. He was also selected as the inaugural poet laureate of Kern County.
In Outdoor Chamber Music, Thompson has gathered a selection of plein air poems, written during a year in which he decided not to work at his desk at home in the farmhouse where his wife Chris’ family has lived for four generations. Instead, he drove every morning to someplace nearby where he responded to the surrounding landscape: the Elk Hills, the California Aqueduct, canals, nut groves, horse ranches, and dairies, fields and fallow land. These poems are specific, noticing flora and fauna that is often overlooked, but they also resonate with something numinous.
Paperback: 54 pages
Publisher: Kelsay Books/Aldrich Press (October 11, 2018)