The Voyage is a collection of poems culled from a lifetime of meditations on self, family, time, and ageing; it also reflects on political and social aspects of human lives, such as hubris, abuse of power, racism and oppression.

H[ubert] Nigel Thomas grew up in St Vincent and the Grenadines but moved to Montreal in 1968. He is the author of 11 books and dozens of essays. His novels Spirits in the Dark and No Safeguards were shortlisted for the Quebec Writers Federation Hugh MacLennan Fiction Prize. Des vies Cassées (the translation of Lives: Whole and Otherwise) was shortlisted for le Prix Carbet des Lycéens. He holds the 2000 Professional of the Year Jackie Robinson Award, the 2013 Université Laval’s Hommage aux créateurs, and the 2020 Black Theatre Workshop’s Martin Luther King Jr. Achievement Award. The Canadian High Commission to Barbados and the Eastern Caribbean States deems him to be one of Canada’s outstanding immigrants from St Vincent and the Grenadines. His books Behind the Face of Winter and Lives: Whole and Otherwise have been translated into French.

H. Nigel Thomas' profile page

"Empathetic and thoughtful, Thomas explores form and language to bore into broader insular assumptions, long-held truths worth dismantling, and his own outlook on the past and present." --Montreal Review of Books

"Vivid in detail, vibrating with emotion and outrage, The Voyage travels deep into the past to unleash the burdens of history and expose its corroded foundations. With brutal honesty and exquisite musicality, the poems deliver memoirs of a Caribbean childhood and the ongoing slavery of poverty and oppression before shifting to a Canadian perspective, trapped in 'the nets of stereotypes,' bearing witness to injustice, and reminding us, with eloquence and wisdom, 'of the prisons we live in.'" --Cora Siré, poet and novelist

"In this collection of lyrical and narrative poems, H Nigel Thomas charts his evolution as a whole person. Through complicated geographies of family, politics, history, sexuality, spirituality, and transience, readers will gain valuable insight into the heart and soul of one of our most treasured and admired writers. The Voyage is sure to enlighten and captivate not only those already familiar with his oeuvre, but also admirers of poetry that is both honest, candid, vulnerable, and inspiring." --Faizal Deen, author of Land Without Chocolate and The Greatest Films

"H Nigel Thomas skilfully depicts the mystery of filiation and shows the power of poetry to reveal the truth of our most intimate being, enlivened and nourished by the contradictions inherent in it." --Joël Des Rosiers, author of Vetiver, winner of Le grand prix du livre de Montreal, and the Governor General's Award for Translation

"These poems, precise and resonant, sing of reckoning--with self, with circumstance, with family. And they sing across a hemisphere, from St Vincent to Montréal and carry us across distances both physical and psychological to celebrate the resolve to move forward." --Kaie Kellough, author of Magnet Equator, winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize; and Dominoes at the Crossroads, winner of the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction