Ishion Hutchinson Selected Works

School of Instructions centers on the experience of West Indian volunteer soldiers in British regiments during World War I. The poem gathers the psychic and physical terrors of these Black soldiers in the Middle East war theater and refracts their struggle against the colonial power they served. Simultaneity abounds: the narratives of the soldiers overlap with that of Godspeed, a young schoolboy living in rural Jamaica of the 1990s. This visionary collision, written in a form Ishion Hutchinson calls “contrapuntal versets,” unsettles time and event. It reshapes grand gestures of heroism into a music of supple, vigilant intensity. The triumph of School of Instructions is how it confronts the legacy of imperial silencing and etches shards of remembrances into a form of survival.

In House of Lords and Commons, the revelatory and vital new collection of poems from the winner of the 2013 Whiting Award in poetry, Ishion Hutchinson returns to the difficult beauty of the Jamaican landscape with remarkable lyric precision. Here, the poet holds his world in full focus but at an astonishing angle: from the violence of the seventeenth-century English Civil War as refracted through a mythic sea wanderer, right down to the dark interior of love.

These poems arrange the contemporary continuum of home and abroad into a wonderment of cracked narrative sequences and tumultuous personae. With ears tuned to the vernacular, the collection vividly binds us to what is terrifying about happiness, loss, and the lure of the sea. House of Lords and Commons testifies to the particular courage it takes to wade unsettled, uncertain, and unfettered in the wake of our shared human experience.

Creating an impressionistic portrait of the poet's boyhood in rural Jamaica, these narrative poems explore the West Indian distrust of European literature and mythology. Written in both traditional and formless verse, as well as in English and Jamaican patois, the book is structured as the spiritual journey of a poet-speaker caught between two worlds: one a benign culture of bush folk and the other a luminous but dangerous sea of myth. The speaker fears the land of myth because he is loyal to the bush people, but he also desires to transcend his physical and intellectual poverty. Little by little, the two cultures come together as the speaker begins grafting childhood memory to the world of imagination, shaped by books, art, music, and travel. At the core of the collection are several elegies to the poet's grandmother, May, who encouraged his young creativity.

Poet Ishion Hutchinson's The Garden weaves through an original ink and watercolor environment—forming Rocket Chair Media's first original collaboration. Illustrated, interactive and unlike any reading on paper, this digital app presents an experience with meaningful, metaphoric content beyond the page.