House of Lords and Commons

by Ishion Hutchinson

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374173029
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	09/20/2016
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. His poetry collection Far District (2010) won the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, and House of Lords and Commons (2016) won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. Other honors include a Whiting Writers’ Award, the Glenna Luschei Award from Prairie Schooner journal, and the Academy of American Poets’ Larry Levis Prize. He is an assistant professor of English at Cornell University.

Editorial Reviews

Ishion Hutchinson's darkly tinged yet exuberant new poems are the strongest to come out of the Caribbean in a generation…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 stranger-in-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…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.

The New York Times Book Review - William Logan

★ 09/19/2016
“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.)

Publishers Weekly

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD IN POETRY

New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2016

Library Journal 5 Best Poetry books of 2016

"Hutchinson’s lines listen to themselves, finding the next phrase, and then the next, implicit in what’s already been written down. His sound effects are exquisite: the clusters of consonants . . . and the vowels so open you could fall into them, the magisterial cresting syntax, the brilliant coupling of unlike words . . . [A] very promising book." —Dan Chiasson, New Yorker

“What nerve and music his poems possess, how beautifully they chart the poet’s search. House of Lords and Commons begins the mythology of a great voice.” —John Freeman

“To call Ishion Hutchinson a brilliant Caribbean poet is just as silly as pigeon-holing Eavan Boland an ‘Irish poet’ or Adonis a ‘poet from Syria.’ This is simply because Hutchinson comes to us from the country called music, he stuns the reader with the sheer symphony of his sentences.
I love his rage against politics (‘casting / beatitudes at the castor-oiled pimps / in Parliament; Pray for them, joyfully, / their amazing death!’) and the lyrics of childhood intimacies, of tenderness, fatherhood. To capture one of these tonalities would already have been a wonderful gift. But the fact of their abundant, generous, choral presence on these pages, tells us that we are in Hutchinson major talent. He is without a doubt one of the most gifted poets of my generation.” —Ilya Kaminsky

“Writing about the colonial legacy of violence on the paradisaical landscape of rural Jamaica, Ishion Hutchinson is a poet of great imaginative intensity. His sponsors are Hart Crane, George Seferis, and Derek Walcott, who, like him, are luxurious and stern at once. In these poems, hammered language has a jazzy, classical, rough, painterly beauty.” —Henri Cole

“A tensile strength runs through the vibrant abundance of Ishion Hutchinson’s work—it is the pure line of poetry, shaped by his sun-lit vision and music. Lords and Commons has been wrested from suffering and cruelty, irony and violence. And, in the end, it is an act of forgiveness.” —Susan Stewart

From the Publisher

★ 07/01/2016
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

Library Journal