Bøker av Ishion Hutchinson

In language that is sensuous and biblical, School of Instructions centres on the experience of West Indian volunteer soldiers in British regiments during the First World War.

A stunning memorial work that excavates the forgotten experience of West Indian soldiers during World War I.Deep-dyed in language both sensuous and biblical, Ishion Hutchinson's School of Instructions memorializes the experience of West Indian soldiers volunteering in British regiments in the Middle East during World War I. The poem narrates the psychic and physical terrors of these young Black fighters in as they struggle against the colonial power they served; their story overlaps with that of Godspeed, a schoolboy living in rural Jamaica of the 1990s. This visionary collision, in which the horizontal, documentary shape of the narrative is interrupted by sudden lyric effusions, unsettles both time and event, mapping great moments of heroism onto the trials of everyday existence It reshapes grand gestures of heroism in a music of supple, vigilant intensity. Elegiac, epochal and lyrical, School of Instructions confronts the legacy of imperial silencing and weaves shards of remembrance-"your word mass / your mix match / your jamming of elements"-into a unique form of survival. It is a masterpiece of imaginative recuperation by a poet of prodigious gifts.

Far District, the transporting debut from the author of House of Lords and Commons, is structured as the spiritual journey of a poet-speaker caught between two cultures. As childhood memory is grafted to the world of imagination - shaped by books, art, music and travel - the two come together to develop a new vision of what 'home' might offer.'Far District is a classic, which is to say a rare and exemplary first book. This book is striking for the way Ishion Hutchinson's gorgeously textured language - shanty-zinc, asthmatic whirl, poincianas - stretches over far-reaching narratives of landscape and culture. With an ear "e;tuned to the blue above and below"e; he captures the physical rhythms of his native Jamaica as well as the broader, metaphysical rhythms of distance and displacement, "e;of [travelling] the narrow bridge separating"e; past and present.' PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry'At once biography and autobiography, generous with its thinking and observations . . . the poems are urgent, authentic, deeply felt, and beautifully shaped. It is rare to find such achievement in a first collection, where an author writes from a place of humility in the face of literary tradition. His work possesses high artistic merit; his love of world literature suffuses his lines and spurs his ambition. This collection is a true work of alchemy.' Whiting Awards

'Exquisite' (New Yorker), 'breathtaking' (Los Angeles Times), 'baroque and moon-lit' (Boston Globe) - House of Lords and Commons enthralled readers in the Americas when it recently appeared, winning the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and being widely applauded in 'books of the year'. No wonder this first British publication is a significant and much anticipated event. Ishion Hutchinson's book is a profound engagement with culture and landscape, seascape and language, inheritance and race. It speaks - as its title implies - to a pursuit of justice and rebalance of a world in which lords and commoners must live side by side, and where the distance between those who 'have' and those who 'have not' is a more breaching and surprising journey than we perhaps once thought. The poems convey the complex allure of Hutchinson's native Jamaican landscape, and the violent forces that shaped its history, with remarkable lyric precision. But they speak far beyond Caribbean experience, thanks to the author's uncanny ability to reach the universal within the local. House of Lords and Commons is a skilfully crafted and tender expression of human experience in a world of prejudice and danger that is also a world of intense colour, remarkable music, indefatigable love.'Ishion Hutchinson's darkly tinged yet exuberant new poems are the strongest to come out of the Caribbean in a generation.' William Logan, New York Times Book Review

In House of Lords and Commons, the revelatory and vital new collection of poems from the winner of the 2013 Whiting Writers' Award in poetry, Ishion Hutchinson returns to the difficult beauty of the Jamaican landscape with remarkable lyric precision.