Lewis Thompson, one of the greatest and least known pioneers of the current mystical renaissance, died in Benares, India at the age of forty in 1949. He left behind an extraordinary prose book, Mirror to the Light, together with thousands of diary entries and the brilliant poems collected and published here for the first time.

BOOK REVIEWS:

The publication of Black Sun will undoubtedly be one of the main spiritual events of the early twenty-first century, especially among those seekers who aspire to be vessels or instruments of sacred creativity. 

– Andrew Harvey, best-selling spiritual author. 

I have read “The Black Angel” [one poem in this collection] and would give five years of my life to have written it. If Thompson wrote other poems as explosive and majestic as this one, he would rank amongst the greatest spiritual poets in English. And not just of this godforsaken century, either. 

– Lawrence Durrell, author The Alexandria Quartet, in conversation with Andrew Harvey, 1986. 

There are some great wings here, vast ones, though some contemplation may be needed before liftoff. This is old-world genius stuff. I wish I could have met you Lewis, thanks for the gold in these poems, it will help my own pen sing. 

– Daniel Ladinsky, author of The Gift, Poems of Hafiz, a best-selling poetry book in America. 

Homage to Hohm Press for bringing out the first collected poems of Lewis Thompson! Lovers of poetry, amateurs and professionals alike, should welcome this latest disciple in our great English and American tradition of religious poets: Blake, Donne, Hopkins, Dickinson. I can think of no other poet who so fully and deeply combines Eastern mystical traditions with Christian themes and English prosody. Thompson's mystic verse, like his brief life, is sunstruck: full of hard, dazzling light that blinds and illumines. “Who dares the calm machine?” he asks. In these poems, which are also conundrums (like Emily Dickinson's) and meditations (like Donne’s), Thompson “shatters . . . the mirror-wall of words.” 

– Nancy Schoenberger, author of the recent poetry collection Long Like a River, and the biography Dangerous Muse, The Life of Lady Caroline Blackwood.