The Art of Losing

Written by Joe Carrick-Varty for PN Review on Tuesday, May 5th, 2020

Marvin Thompson’s Road Trip is a life-affirming lesson in lostness, in being lost, in losing people, hope, one’s sense of self, one’s sense of belonging to a world where ‘a taxi driver / on a Kingston / roadside / branded me, / my parents, / my brothers / English. / Not Jamaican.’ A world where ‘150,000 larches / have been / felled.’ A world where ‘starlings / rise and rise / into the dusk’s reds’. Because it’s the poet’s ear for wonder that makes this book so special – the urge to search, to find, to question.