This book is an expanded version of an earlier work entitled Wheat Rippling in the Sunlight published by RoseDog in 2005. In this work the Table of Contents is enhanced by grouping the poems into eight sections by year. The primary purpose of this new book is to incorporate ten poems that did not go into the original work. Included are four poems written over forty years ago and preserved by a friend who returned them to the author in 2005 after Wheat Rippling in the Sunlight was published. These poems are included in Poems of the Lost Thompson along with Inner Landscapes and The Gift which were written in the same period. Following is a list of the added poems and the sections they are in.
POEMS OF THE LOST THOMPSON 1969 - 1972
My Father's Death in 1968
Autumn Leaves
Hitchhiking in Winter, 1972
Truck Stop Ride
REVERBERATIONS 1975 - 1976
Merry Xmas & a Drafty New Year
LOVE INTERLUDES 1988 - 1989
Couple's Dialogue
APPALACHIAN POEMS 1992 - 2012
Moles Who?
Valentine
Darkness
Goodbye, Until Then
The four most recent poems where included in the Appalachian Poems section along with For a Woman Hurt at Home which was written during the same period.
In addition to incorporating these ten new poems, a brief biography of the author has been added plus the notes written for a YouTube video which discusses the poetry. To access this video, get into YouTube and search for Wheat Rippling in the Sunlight.
Themes prominent in the poems include sexual desire and wooing of women, spirituality and personal growth, homelessness, and loneliness. Wheat, water, and light are symbolic of life and spirituality in the poems. Love for the earth is expressed in descriptions of fields and the prairie, mountains and the ocean. There are several styles of poetry in the collection including rhymed verse, prose poems, haikus, and stream-of-consciousness. Many of the poems rely on internal rhyme and alliteration or ease of word flow to establish poetic unity, rather than end rhyme.
The earliest poems were written while the author was attending a small college in southern Minnesota. The poems include topics such as sexual passion, the inevitability of death, and mental disintegration that was healed partly by the writing of the poems themselves. These poems of healing include the mystic poem The Gift written in the spring of 1970.
The author spent several years, 1969-1972, living on the streets, riding freight trains and hitch-hiking around the country. A particularly enjoyable train ride is remembered in the poem Whitefish Train Station. After this period of wandering the author moved west in 1975 and eventually quit drinking alcohol on April 29, 1985. The flowering of poetry in 1986 began during a personal growth seminar with the stream-of-consciousness In Flight, a poem of mystical union with God.