Poetry review – LINE DANCING: Ian Pople considers how the particular strengths of N S Thompson’s poetry show themselves across this wide-ranging collection
Line Dancing and Other Poems
N. S. Thompson
Shoestring Press
ISBN 9781915553560
77pp £12.00
To begin on a sad note: N. S. Thompson’s Line Dancing and Other Poems is one of the last books published by Shoestring Press before its closure in 2025, following the death of poet and publisher John Lucas. It is, however, a book which contains a wide variety of forms, ranging from closely rhymed forms, and un-rhymed pentameters to prose poems. Some of these felt more convincing than others, and occasionally, the poems seemed to begin with a form and end there, too. Thompson is most convincing when he lets himself go more. Where he allows himself space, the poems feel both under pressure and expansive and are mostly successful – as for instance in the pentameters where Thompson’s feel for rhythm lets the syntax move and lope with a beguiling naturalness.
“Chocolates on a Sunday Night,” describes a father taking his two children to a sweet shop on that Sunday night. The three people walk through an urban landscape,
Hunched lampposts shouldering the gathering dusk, as we
Set off, quick marched, towards the grim main road
That marshalled districts up the line to face
The onslaught of the metropolis, the rank
And file of empty streets stretched uniform and grey
Thompson’s movement of the description into extended military/battle metaphor has been earned by this stage of the poem. And the effect is to emphasize the deeply ambivalent relationship the children have with a rather daunting father. The poem ends in a way which is deeply moving,
And two small minds, struck
That only chocolates could soften up
The brittleness we felt at home, prayed we could take
Them quietly and bring about some peace
As we shot down the pavements, our hopes hanging on
The bag of chocolates on a Sunday night.
Here, the clarity of Thompson’s syntax and the rendering of the ‘two small minds’ is persuasive. The adjectives and adverbs are kept to a minimum. And the poem ends with the final two lines gathering the pace of the walking children to culminate in the full emotional impact of that last image.
“Anthropology: Ano MCMLXVIII” is a sequence of prose poems about Thompson’s reactions to the disturbances centered on, but not confined to, French students in 1968. Thompson is what the French call a Soixante-Huitard, i.e., someone who took part in the events in Paris at that time. Thompson’s “Anthropology,” is just that. He places his narrator inside an urban environment, this time clearly Paris. He also introduces scenes in Catholic churches where the narrator is involved in the service, perhaps as an altar-boy. Here, there is real emotional conflict. This is,
The year the barns burned, the world rebelled and the sun cut ribbons over streaming
round, now sticky, wet with blood, The word made flesh. Shadows scored the earth like
. knife blades. On furrowed ground, the voiceless found expression.
If the model here is Geoffrey Hill, the lesson is well-learned, although Hill might have ended things with ‘the word made flesh.’ The last two sentences feel as though they might be doing the readers’ work for them.
The ten sections of the poem end with the narrator realizing acutely how limited their response has been to the events they have witnessed. The title, “Anthropology,” is not so much a nod towards the growth of the poet’s mind as a realization that the narrator may have aspirations beyond their reach, ‘… and like some poet rise beyond the boredom and despair.’ Thus, “Anthropology,” ends on a note of bathos, ‘The theory of the barricades. On cobbled streets. Your heart laid bare by careless revolution. But with someone hungry by the road, how could you consider your admission to the Academy?’
Thompson’s “Messaien: Quartet for the end of time” is almost worth the price of the book alone. That piece of music and its context have been written about extensively before, most recently in a prose memoir by Michael Symmons-Roberts. But Thompson’s piercing four-line stanzas capture the moment in a way that the aforementioned Geoffrey Hill would admire. This is the first of the two numbered stanzas,
Wind soughs: rain soaks the ill-constructed camp
Whose wooden stamp
Is rigid with the staves and barbs of wire
On which his semi-quavers dance.
Again, it is the powerful simplicity that hits home. Not simply the opening, two-syllable phrase, which pulls through to the next two monosyllables in ‘rain soaks.’ This latter might have been cliché but Thompson then brings the weather into the construction of buildings and the ways in which they mirror the music. That ‘barbs of wire,’ might also feel a bit risky but Thompson places it between the two musical references to real affect. In part, too, the opening weather moves through into the final monosyllable ‘dance.’ In a poem like this, Thompson’s formal skills are particularly effective and the melding of form and content most achieved.
Having highlighted some of the successful aspects of this collection I must, unfortunately, return to some of the reservations hinted at in the opening paragraph. For instance, where Thompson adopts a neat, rhymed, stanzaic form he tends to lose articles in ways that make the syntax and lines feel abrupt as if reaching for effect. This from “In a City Bookshop,”
Old shop fronts, many storeyed,
Gilt grimed with dust, but when panes catch the sun
The mind imagines them a gun
Salute in flashes: ornate sterns that dwarf
The street like galleons, multi-storied.
There is a contrast here, I would suggest, between the use of the articles through this stanza and the absence before ‘gilt’ and ‘panes.’ Gilt is an uncountable noun so the loss if the article is perfectly possible. But ‘panes’ are countable, and the loss of ‘window’ in the search for a kind of iambic pulse feels rather less excusable. And in the reach for rhyme we have the split in the compound noun ‘gun salute’ across the line break.
The more formal poems are, also, often overwritten, with adjectives and adverbs filling in for real emotion. In the very early “Dante Alighieri on TV,” the narrator is woken in the night by the poem’s title character, and they go to the narrator’s living room to watch television,
The creature he had seen
Came out of Africa: the Video
Which showed a stealthy leopard, long and lean
It stalked. My honoured shade made as to go,
When next we saw a regal lion roar.
Image of pride! O poor trembling maestro!
Thompson’s use of Dante’s own terza rima seems to force him into using the adjectives in the third line here and then the archaism of the syntax at the start of the next stanza. I would imagine that Thompson’s models do not include Basil Bunting, but one of Bunting’s dictums was that ‘adjectives bleed nouns.’
On balance then this is a book with many strong qualities. As I have suggested, there is plenty here to suggest that Thompson can feel the need and drive to write. Larkin commented that rhyme often gave him his next line. But Larkin, to state the obvious, was Larkin. It is noticeable that Thompson feels able to use prose poetry as a contrast to his formal writing; it is one of this book’s great strengths. And it is in such writing that we feel the headwinds driving the author.
Sep 15 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – N S Thompson
Poetry review – LINE DANCING: Ian Pople considers how the particular strengths of N S Thompson’s poetry show themselves across this wide-ranging collection
Line Dancing and Other Poems
N. S. Thompson
Shoestring Press
ISBN 9781915553560
77pp £12.00
To begin on a sad note: N. S. Thompson’s Line Dancing and Other Poems is one of the last books published by Shoestring Press before its closure in 2025, following the death of poet and publisher John Lucas. It is, however, a book which contains a wide variety of forms, ranging from closely rhymed forms, and un-rhymed pentameters to prose poems. Some of these felt more convincing than others, and occasionally, the poems seemed to begin with a form and end there, too. Thompson is most convincing when he lets himself go more. Where he allows himself space, the poems feel both under pressure and expansive and are mostly successful – as for instance in the pentameters where Thompson’s feel for rhythm lets the syntax move and lope with a beguiling naturalness.
“Chocolates on a Sunday Night,” describes a father taking his two children to a sweet shop on that Sunday night. The three people walk through an urban landscape,
Hunched lampposts shouldering the gathering dusk, as we
Set off, quick marched, towards the grim main road
That marshalled districts up the line to face
The onslaught of the metropolis, the rank
And file of empty streets stretched uniform and grey
Thompson’s movement of the description into extended military/battle metaphor has been earned by this stage of the poem. And the effect is to emphasize the deeply ambivalent relationship the children have with a rather daunting father. The poem ends in a way which is deeply moving,
And two small minds, struck
That only chocolates could soften up
The brittleness we felt at home, prayed we could take
Them quietly and bring about some peace
As we shot down the pavements, our hopes hanging on
The bag of chocolates on a Sunday night.
Here, the clarity of Thompson’s syntax and the rendering of the ‘two small minds’ is persuasive. The adjectives and adverbs are kept to a minimum. And the poem ends with the final two lines gathering the pace of the walking children to culminate in the full emotional impact of that last image.
“Anthropology: Ano MCMLXVIII” is a sequence of prose poems about Thompson’s reactions to the disturbances centered on, but not confined to, French students in 1968. Thompson is what the French call a Soixante-Huitard, i.e., someone who took part in the events in Paris at that time. Thompson’s “Anthropology,” is just that. He places his narrator inside an urban environment, this time clearly Paris. He also introduces scenes in Catholic churches where the narrator is involved in the service, perhaps as an altar-boy. Here, there is real emotional conflict. This is,
The year the barns burned, the world rebelled and the sun cut ribbons over streaming
round, now sticky, wet with blood, The word made flesh. Shadows scored the earth like
. knife blades. On furrowed ground, the voiceless found expression.
If the model here is Geoffrey Hill, the lesson is well-learned, although Hill might have ended things with ‘the word made flesh.’ The last two sentences feel as though they might be doing the readers’ work for them.
The ten sections of the poem end with the narrator realizing acutely how limited their response has been to the events they have witnessed. The title, “Anthropology,” is not so much a nod towards the growth of the poet’s mind as a realization that the narrator may have aspirations beyond their reach, ‘… and like some poet rise beyond the boredom and despair.’ Thus, “Anthropology,” ends on a note of bathos, ‘The theory of the barricades. On cobbled streets. Your heart laid bare by careless revolution. But with someone hungry by the road, how could you consider your admission to the Academy?’
Thompson’s “Messaien: Quartet for the end of time” is almost worth the price of the book alone. That piece of music and its context have been written about extensively before, most recently in a prose memoir by Michael Symmons-Roberts. But Thompson’s piercing four-line stanzas capture the moment in a way that the aforementioned Geoffrey Hill would admire. This is the first of the two numbered stanzas,
Wind soughs: rain soaks the ill-constructed camp
Whose wooden stamp
Is rigid with the staves and barbs of wire
On which his semi-quavers dance.
Again, it is the powerful simplicity that hits home. Not simply the opening, two-syllable phrase, which pulls through to the next two monosyllables in ‘rain soaks.’ This latter might have been cliché but Thompson then brings the weather into the construction of buildings and the ways in which they mirror the music. That ‘barbs of wire,’ might also feel a bit risky but Thompson places it between the two musical references to real affect. In part, too, the opening weather moves through into the final monosyllable ‘dance.’ In a poem like this, Thompson’s formal skills are particularly effective and the melding of form and content most achieved.
Having highlighted some of the successful aspects of this collection I must, unfortunately, return to some of the reservations hinted at in the opening paragraph. For instance, where Thompson adopts a neat, rhymed, stanzaic form he tends to lose articles in ways that make the syntax and lines feel abrupt as if reaching for effect. This from “In a City Bookshop,”
Old shop fronts, many storeyed,
Gilt grimed with dust, but when panes catch the sun
The mind imagines them a gun
Salute in flashes: ornate sterns that dwarf
The street like galleons, multi-storied.
There is a contrast here, I would suggest, between the use of the articles through this stanza and the absence before ‘gilt’ and ‘panes.’ Gilt is an uncountable noun so the loss if the article is perfectly possible. But ‘panes’ are countable, and the loss of ‘window’ in the search for a kind of iambic pulse feels rather less excusable. And in the reach for rhyme we have the split in the compound noun ‘gun salute’ across the line break.
The more formal poems are, also, often overwritten, with adjectives and adverbs filling in for real emotion. In the very early “Dante Alighieri on TV,” the narrator is woken in the night by the poem’s title character, and they go to the narrator’s living room to watch television,
The creature he had seen
Came out of Africa: the Video
Which showed a stealthy leopard, long and lean
It stalked. My honoured shade made as to go,
When next we saw a regal lion roar.
Image of pride! O poor trembling maestro!
Thompson’s use of Dante’s own terza rima seems to force him into using the adjectives in the third line here and then the archaism of the syntax at the start of the next stanza. I would imagine that Thompson’s models do not include Basil Bunting, but one of Bunting’s dictums was that ‘adjectives bleed nouns.’
On balance then this is a book with many strong qualities. As I have suggested, there is plenty here to suggest that Thompson can feel the need and drive to write. Larkin commented that rhyme often gave him his next line. But Larkin, to state the obvious, was Larkin. It is noticeable that Thompson feels able to use prose poetry as a contrast to his formal writing; it is one of this book’s great strengths. And it is in such writing that we feel the headwinds driving the author.