Rooms

Rooms is a collection that refuses to stand still. These poems crackle with music and sport, with birdsong and weather, with the daily negotiations of belonging. Thompson turns each room he enters - domestic, historical, political - into a site of challenge and celebration, exposing the fractures beneath the floorboards and the beauty that insists on breaking through. Fatherhood sits at the centre of the collection, being Black and bringing up Mixed Race children in Wales, negotiating tenderness, vigilance, and the quiet work of protection. Nature threads through the poems as both solace and witness, its landscapes carrying the marks of history. The legacy of the British Empire presses in, shaping daily experience and national memory. Sport and music surface as the rhythms of community, aspiration, and escape, grounding the poems in lived culture. Together, these themes build a portrait of what it means to be Black and British today: complex, joyful, contested, and always in motion.