Beg No Pardon

by Lynne Thompson

The award-winning first collection from acclaimed poet Lynne Thompson, this vital book uses the music and language of the poet's hybrid culture to describe a vivid world of Afro-Caribbean heritage. Extroverted, declarative, jazzy, and vital, BEG NO PARDON commands attention from the first word to the last. Lynne Thompson's poetry is brimming with personality and attitude in the very best sense--pride, dignity, and graceful indignation--in poems about the search for legacy, love of legacy, and joy of legacy. Thompson explores identity from a little-known and complicated beginning, both personally and culturally. Using the music and language of her hybrid culture Thompson describes a vivid world of Afro-Caribbean heritage and late 20th-century life. "In Lynne Thompson's collection, Beg No Pardon , the poems move from precise reflections on childhood to the rights of passage of young adult years, and then on to all the days of joy and despair, solitude, longing, and self-knowledge that follow in a life richly lived and acutely observed. Thompson is a poet who revels in language -- that 'house of many pleasures.' Like the 'one good eye' of her 'Unworshipped Woman,' this collection delights, 'it flash--'"--Natasha Trethewey "The poems in Lynne Thompson's Beg No Pardon sing of her Caribbean ancestors, won't be told the can or can't do, have the perfume of sin bleeding from their fingertips. These poems drip from lips the color of peril. Here is a deep ode to blackness, an incantatory chant from a deep well of mythic missives."--Tony Barnstone "There are obvious pleasures Thompson's improvisational sense of the line, her rich, haunted, but not morose sack of images, and her depth of subject combined with an accessibility for which I feel grateful. Her allusions are not "classical," but they are archetypal. If Thompson limited herself to the ancestral/mystical, the collection might become redundant. Instead, she moves into the present tense of sex, and jazz, and blackness, claiming a delicious word-palette. The poems here seduce and confront and refuse to be anonymous -- or they revel in the transgressions anonymity affords. They really do beg no pardon."--Judge of the GLCA New Writers Award Poetry. African & African American Studies. Women's Studies.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published July 16, 2007

About the author

Lynne Thompson served as the 2021-22 Poet Laureate for the City of Los Angeles and received a Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets in 2022. She received her BA from Scripps College and a JD from Southwestern School of Law. After practicing law for many years, Thompson served as the Director of Labor and Employee Relations at the University of California, Los Angeles, for twenty years. Her first collection of poems, Beg No Pardon, won the Perugia Press Book Prize in 2007 and the Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writers Award in 2008. She’s also the author of Start With a Small Guitar (What Books Press, 2013) and Fretwork (Marsh Hawk Books, 2019). A recipient of the George Drury Smith Award for Achievement in Poetry in 2023, she has also received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, Summer Literary Series (Kenya), and the City of Los Angeles. Thompson sits on the Boards of Cave Canem, The Poetry Foundation, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Scripps College where she recently completed a four-year term as Chair of the Board of Trustees. Thompson lives in Los Angeles, California.

Reviews

[Eunice (nerdytalksbookblog) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow, this is a beautiful and a powerful book! Proud to have read something like this.

Here are some of my favorites:

Scissors
Marriage, A Fugue
She, Named P___ at birth, Speak to me, says
Purgatorio
Small, Mad Planets
Crescent
Short Stack with Switch Monkey

Here is the poem Scissors

There's no synonym
for scissors. Everyone
with a Roget's knows that.
Rock. Papers. Scissors.
And by cut of course,
you may mean score, sever,
abscind, dissect, disjoin, cleave,
but scissors are instruments
unto themselves. Just like
you won't find a synonym
for Utah or any other state.
Many things just can't be
said any other way: toothache
or mercurochrome or 1951.
So, when I say it's over, I don't
mean interlude or maybe.

[Bruce · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fine fine work. This collection just pops with jazz fired energy. Lynne speaks to her heritage, to the women in her family that formed her identity, to finding herself in Southern California, to her Caribbean roots, to the power of music, and to the nature of relationships. I particulary love the jazzy rhythyms of pieces like House of Many Pleasures and Highway 61. This is work that I have shared with friends who don't read poetry, and it seems to speak to everyone. Highly recommended.

[Cheryl Klein · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lynne Thompson isn't just an amazing poet, she's a versatile one--there are persona poems in here, prose poems, short clever poems, long allusive poems, mysterious near-cut-ups, dense and troubling poems, funny poems about fitting into jeans. She describes the moon (she's a writer who dares to describe the moon) as "a subversive magnet," which could double as a description of a certain really brilliant poet.