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Material Type | Library | Call Number | Item Barcode | Location |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Book | Searching... Andover - Memorial Hall Library | 811.6 HUT | 31330008104253 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Chelmsford Public Library | POETRY/HUTCHINSON | 31480010921119 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... North Andover - Stevens Memorial Library | 811.6 HUTCHINSON | 31478010076074 | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
A stunning collection that traverses the borders of culture and time, from the 2011 winner of the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award
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. 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.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
"History is dismantled music; slant,/ bleak on gravel," Hutchinson (Far District) writes in a second collection that sees him profiting highly from Emily Dickinson's dictum to tell the truth but tell it slant. In poetic suites more narrative and seamlessly associative than his previous work, Hutchinson melds Jamaica's history of political strife and the lives of its citizens into sensuous evocations of landscape: "After the hurricane walks a silence, deranged, white as the white helmets of government surveyors looking into roofless/ shacks." Hutchinson finds a dexterous register in which high and low diction strike sparks: "I mitre solid shadow, setting fire to snow in my ark./ I credit not the genie but the coral rock." His eye for local color elevates neighbors and relatives into figures of archetypal resonance, and his biting precision captures "Pure echo in the train's/ beam arriving on its cold nerve of iron." Informed both by sonorous biblical cadence and a fibrous Saxon lexicon of canonical Western references, Hutchinson's majestic lines snap like starched laundry in coastal wind: "drift-pocked, solitary/ ducks across the bay's industrial/ ruts." Yet this jaunty "ice-pick raconteur" is capable of stunning moments of visionary lyricism: "A soft light, God's idleness/ warms the skin of the lake." These poems herald the maturity of a major poetic voice. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
For his second full-length book of poetry, after the award-winning Far District (2010), Hutchinson has crafted a tightly knit, deeply resonant collection. Hutchinson's formal verse and measured lyrics disguise a frenetic energy by burning slowly to a sudden boil. The Small Dark Interior opens with a young child gazing longingly at a newly, delicately frozen pond but closes when the speaker's thoughts turn abruptly to forgiveness for his father. A Burnt Ship catalogs the spilled belongings from a ship's hold (sunken masks, / god's horn, perfume, ivory tusks, / market dust), before erupting in the expected, yet still unsettling conclusion that all were lost, all were destroyed. Other poems maintain a serene inner stillness, an even calm that complements the charged tension. Moved by the Beauty of Trees simply repeats phrases of beauty, green, and leaves, mimicking the natural sound of rolling foliage in soft breeze. The only downside is Hutchinson's affinity for short lines and short poems; readers will finish the collection longing for more. Fans of Yusef Komunyakaa, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, and Camille Rankine will especially enjoy Hutchinson's latest.--Báez, Diego Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
ISHION HUTCHINSON'S DARKLY TINGED yet exuberant new poems are the strongest to come out of the Caribbean in a generation. Haunted by his country's fractured past, by memories of an upbringing starved of books, he escaped from history through literature. If his heart still lies in Jamaica, writers have given him a landscape beyond memory. His touchstone is the magnificent passage in Xenophon where the Greek mercenaries, having fought their way across the Persian Empire, come to the Black Sea, shouting "Thalatta! Thalatta!" ("The sea! The sea!"). The moment would brand any poet trying to find his way home. if this resembles Derek Walcott's poetry, the heavy influence is lightly worn. The saturated descriptions of island flora, the pen portraits (as they once were called) of local characters, the strangerin-a-strange-land displacement, the visceral love of Europe and the classics - all these make "House of Lords and Commons" indebted to the poet who for half a century has cast a long shadow over Caribbean literature. Hutchinson's elegant, rough-edged poems have wrestled with influence without being overwhelmed. The streetlights shed pearls that night, stray dogs ran but did not bark at the strange shadows; the Minister of All could not sleep, mosquitoes swarmed around his net, his portrait and his pitcher and drinking glass; the flags stiffened on the embassy building but did not fall when the machine guns flared. Soaked in the intelligence of cities and towns where nature seems the dominating grace, these poems try to negotiate a treaty between Jamaica and the foreign world for which the poet abandoned it. In memories of the near riot of sugar-cane cutters stiffed of their salaries or the mysterious classroom hierarchies of primary school in St. Thomas Parish, the country Hutchinson left behind has rarely been so vividly rendered. After college in Jamaica. the poet flew to America. He now teaches at Cornell. His descriptions find their urgency in his unsettled place between two worlds. (Poetry, for the exile, may be a surrogate home.) The fraught selfexamination of these poems defines their achievement. Where Walcott's point of view was established in his 30s and rarely wavered, Hutchinson seems still in the midst of inventing himself. His rooted suspicion of academic views of empire is no more savagely expressed than during a lecture by a "tweeded rodent scholar" : a bore was harping in dead metaphor the horror of colonial heritage. I sank in the dark, hemorrhaged. There I remembered the peninsula of my sea, the breeze opening the water to no book but dusk; no electricity, just stars pulsing over shanties. The poet may perhaps be forgiven the touch of sentiment at the end. (Night sky makes him mawkish.) The whole of "House of Lords and Commons" - the title an ancient term for the houses of Parliament - is a rejection of the unctuous jargon of academia, its gaseous clichés about the postcolonial Other and the anthropological gaze. Hutchinson writes poetry with an estrangement that doesn't need the justifications of theory or its distaste for drenched metaphors that escape the political realm. The books that infuse these poems look back to the post-Eliot generation of poets, a generation that found inspiration in literature as much as in life - that considered literature, indeed, a higher form of life. A casual allusion to Sir Thomas Browne and sidelong references to Heidegger and Lévi-Strauss set the tone; but Hutchinson can leap in a stanza from Chaucer to Frederick Douglass or, with music in mind, title a poem "Sibelius and Marley." That shotgun wedding takes, not the sublime to the ridiculous, but one sublime to another - alas, the poet's just as cackhanded as most poets who try to turn music into poetry. When Marley "wails and a comet impales the sky," the reader can't help cringing. Hutchinson's affectionate portraits of local characters have the finesse and generosity of Chaucer (rather than the cartoonish burlesque of Browning), and the poems in persona create their voices with an easy command that always eluded Walcott, whose attempts at island patois sound forced. Hutchinson marks the rhythms of local speech without trying to mimic the voice, say, of the record producer Lee (Scratch) Perry: consider the nest of wasps in the heart of the Bush Doctor, consider the nest of locusts in the gut of the Black Heart Man, I put them there, and the others that vibrate at the Feast of the Passover when the collie weed is passed over the roast fish and cornbread. I Upsetter, I Django on the black wax. This may be a bit arch, but the spirited aggression is preferable to the studious self-regard of third-generation confessional poetry. Back home, Hutchinson becomes a Baudelairean flâneur, a tourist in a land more vivid for no longer being his own: Let the cerement of light, the silent snow covering the bells frozen in the towers, speak a country of tired bays, where rain hesitates to break the seamless yellow of toil; let this coffin-shaped light balance on the negative compass, the shock and stun, the heart's sudden brace for a jealous thunder. The metaphors are elsewhere laid on with a trowel; and too many poems descend into lists that run out of steam long before they're finished. Hutchinson arrives in Venice like a yokel with a passport: "I hop off the vaporetto mooring in / the after-storm harbour, puff- chested, shouting: / 'Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them.'" O.K., Othello - but the trace of self-mockery in "puff-chested" isn't enough. Call it the preening of a gifted young artist. THIS IS A young man's book, with the expected flaws of excess and overreaching - before a poet can break the wild horses of invention, he has to capture them. Hutchinson's poems are prosy, often not quite wholes, just fragments of sensibility. Perhaps the occasional straining for intensity ("I circled half-mad a dead azalea scent that framed / my room; I licked anointed oil off a sardine tin") will relax into the giddy accuracy of the best lines here: "the white detonating curtain, the sea, our sea," "a rusty mule, / statue-frozen in the punishable heat," "God grumbles in his mirrored palace." If the voice is sometimes monotonous, the rhetoric often inflated ("they steam chromatic, these Elijahs / in their cloud wheels, fatherless and man-killing" - the "cloud wheels" are just automobiles), Hutchinson has a mature sense of tone and a wary detachment that gives the ordinary the glossy depths of a Vermeer. In a landscape of younger American poets increasingly shy of language rich with responsibility, increasingly suspicious of literature, Hutchinson is like fresh air. "House of Lords and Commons" is his major press debut (a 2010 book was released by a small British publisher). Sometimes it takes an outsider to shake things up. WILLIAM LOGAN is the author, most recently, of "Guilty Knowledge, Guilty Pleasure: The Dirty Art of Poetry."
Library Journal Review
Whiting Award winner Hutchinson here intensifies the promise of his debut, Far District, broadening his vision beyond the history and geography of his homeland, Jamaica, to encompass today's fraught world in visceral and richly compacted off-kilter lyric. Gold jingles in exploitation as "they talk Texas and the north cold,// but mostly oil and Obama," and a genie asks the speaker to build an ark "out of peril and slum/ things" where "I alone when blood and bullet and all Christ-fucking-'Merican-dollar politicians talk/ the pressure down to nothing." Even a poem that opens jauntily with the sighting of a red bicycle near the Ponte Vecchio moves quickly to recalling a mother's fury at her son's disobedience, as "the promised money/ didn't fall from my father's cold heaven in England." Yet there's also the desolate tenderness of seemingly spotting that father while "picking faces in the thick nest of morning's hard light" and a woman has a quiet moment as "the beauty of the trees stills her." No screeds, then, just true, vital stories, charged with emotion and a stunningly beautiful complexity of the language. VERDICT A challenging collection requiring careful reading to pick out the poet's full intent but definitely worth the effort. Highly recommended.-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.