Deformations of holomorphic Poisson manifolds

An unobstructedness theorem is proved for deformations of compact holomorphic Poisson manifolds and applied to a class of examples. These include certain rational surfaces and Hilbert schemes of points on Poisson surfaces. We study in particular the Hilbert schemes of the projective plane and show that a generic deformation is determined by two parameters – an elliptic curve and a translation on it.