Books by Luke Thompson

Singing About Melon opens with a call for silence: 'Silenzio'. This is the self-defeating shout of the guards in the Basilica of St Francis in Assisi, where several of the poems are placed. It is a call that echoes through this collection, playing with sense and nonsense, the sayable and the unsayable, as well as the saying that un-says.

Ganda the rhinoceros was a celebrity when he arrived in Europe in the sixteenth century. Kings and popes were intrigued, while poets and artists raced to depict the rhinoceros regardless of whether they had seen him with their own eyes. Most notable among them was Albrecht D├╝rer, whose celebrated woodcut is held in the British Museum. Rhinoceros is a playful fragmented reflection on the life of Ganda and the position he assumed as representative of his species, layered with expectations from millennia of wonky natural histories, bestiaries and etymologies. It looks at the rhinoceros as a spectacle, tracing a literary journey from Diodorus and Pliny the Elder to Babar the Elephant and Disney, via unicorns, YouTube, Ionesco and the Medicis.