Search results for ""author ishion hutchinson""

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 "tuned to the blue above and below" he captures the physical rhythms of his native Jamaica as well as the broader, metaphysical rhythms of distance and displacement, "of [travelling] the narrow bridge separating" 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

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'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

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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. The poem gathers the psychic and physical terrors of these Black soldiers in the Middle East war theatre and refracts their struggle against the colonial power they served. The narratives of the soldiers overlap with 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. Elegiac and odic, epochal and lyrical, 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.

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This epic masterpiece is a radical landmark in modern literature, reissued with a foreword by poet Ishion Hutchinson to mark Wilson Harris' centenary.'An exhilarating experience ... Genius.' Jamaica KincaidI dreamt I awoke with one dead seeing eye and one living closed eye ...Guyana. An ancient landscape of rainforests and swamplands, haunted by the legacy of slavery and colonial conquest. It is the site of dangerous journeys through the Amazonian interior, where riverboat crews embark on spiritual quests and government surveys are sabotaged by indigenous uprisings. It is a universe of complex moralities, where the conspiracies of a sinister money-lender and the faked death of a murderer question innocence and inheritance. It is a place where life and death, myth and history, philosophy and metaphysics blur. And it is the birthplace of an epic masterpiece. Wilson Harris' The Guyana Quartet consists of four incandescent novels: Palace of the Peacock, The Far Journey of Oudin, The Whole Armour and The Secret Ladder. It is a landmark of twentieth-century literature, as revolutionary today as it was over half a century ago.'The Guyanese William Blake . [Such] poetic intensity.' Angela Carter'One of the great originals ... Visionary ... Dazzlingly illuminating.' Guardian'Amazing ... Masterly ... Near-miraculous.' Observer'Perhaps the most inimitable [writer] produced in the English-speaking Caribbean.' Fred D'Aguiar'An extraordinary writer ... Courageous and visionary ... It speaks to us in tongues.' Pauline Melville'Staggering ... Both brilliant and terrifying.' The Times

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