Paco’s Atlas and Other Poems

John Thieme’s verse makes our flattened earth round again, reinventing it through a series of dreaming reveries that expand the possibilities of poetry and imagine new worlds into being. His poems are crowded with figures from different cultures and eras, among them Marco Polo’s Chinese mistress, Amazonian tribesmen, lacklustre vampires, an anachronistic courtly lover, the aged librarian of the library of Babel, Scheherazade, the Hindu goddess Saraswati, Ben Gunn, the apostle Thomas, a pragmatic dog and a quartet of rescued Iberian tortoises. Breaking boundaries and moving quietly between convention and innovation, the sparkling imagery of Paco’s Atlas upends habitual modes of perception. We come away from the collection with a broader sense of what it is to be human, our limits and our capabilities. A folio of maps in verse, Paco’s Atlas shape-shifts and spills over the borders and frames of atlases geographical, ethnographical, anatomical and zoological. It is filled with the wonder, the horror and the irony of maps: surreal dissections, absurd projections, encyclopaedic compressions, the circular logic of treasure-island shorelines that trap Ben Gunn like vampire bats under the sign of Nosferatu.Vassilena ParashkevovaJohn Thieme’s books include Postcolonial Con-Texts: Writing Back to the Canon, Postcolonial Literary Geographies: Out of Place, The Arnold Anthology of Postcolonial Writing in English and studies of Derek Walcott, R.K. Narayan and V.S. Naipaul. His poetry and fiction have been published in numerous journals around the world, including Setu, The International Literary Quarterly, Asia Literary Review, Quick Fictions, Muse India and Southeast Asian Review of English. Paco’s Atlas is his first collection of poems.