{"id":8832,"date":"2017-12-09T11:43:42","date_gmt":"2017-12-09T10:43:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=8832"},"modified":"2017-12-11T16:09:57","modified_gmt":"2017-12-11T15:09:57","slug":"ishion-hutchinson-house-of-lord-and-commons-faber-faber-12-99-reviewed-by-chad-campbell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=8832","title":{"rendered":"Ishion Hutchinson, House of Lord and Commons<\/em>, reviewed by Chad Campbell"},"content":{"rendered":"
Ishion Hutchinson, House of Lord and Commons<\/em>, (Faber & Faber, \u00a312.99).<\/h5>\n

Ishion Hutchinson\u2019s second book, House of Lords and Commons<\/em>, was published by FSG in America, and released here, in the U.K., by Faber & Faber in November. The book\u2019s reputation precedes it: winner of a National Book Critic Circle Award and top of sever best-books-of lists, it received nearly overwhelmingly positive reviews in the New Yorker<\/em> and New York Times. <\/em><\/p>\n

Hutchinson has been praised for his poetry, which blurs historical timelines, revisits a private and communal story of Jamaica, and gives voice to the continuance of, and silences enforced, its colonial history. Part of the brilliance of this restless, sweeping collection is that it is anchored by a speaker who negotiates these histories by the pursuit of his own lineage, the absence of his own father, and reckonings with the familial dead: the collection has narrative breadth, but moves with lyric intimacy. House of Lords and Commons<\/em> is an exciting, challenging collection from Jamaican poet Ishion Hutchinson.<\/p>\n

\u2018I have been crisscrossing centuries, different existences, the rhythm and mode of places and now it has woven a basket in my head. I am pulling straws from that\u2019, said Hutchinson of the new collection. But he\u2019s also pulled them from his first collection, The Far District<\/em>, published by British press, Peepal Tree, in 2010. The opening poem of House of Lords and Commons<\/em>, \u2018Station\u2019, is nearly identical in terms of situation and scene to the his poem \u2018Terminus\u2019 from The Far District<\/em>. Terminus\u2019 ends:<\/p>\n

\u201cSee him there,\u201d and I turned
\nto my life\u2019s dilemma,
\nmistaking every stranger for him at every port
\nof entry and exit, wild-eyed
\nat the scattering of arrivals, searching out
\nhis face at the edge of the terminal<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

Whereas \u2018Station\u2019 finishes with:<\/p>\n

…Stranger, father, cackling
\nrat, who am I transfixed at the bottom
\nof the station? Pure echo in the train\u2019s
\nbeam arriving on its cold nerve of iron.<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

But \u2018Station\u2019 typifies the finest poems in the collection: where each line is treated as a poem in miniature, and where images can bear a poem\u2019s worth of weight. If quality tends to progress in steps, with House of Lords and Commons<\/em>, Hutchinson has vaulted. Hutchinson returns to the site of some of his earlier material, but with a concentrated, evocative style \u2013 as if pulling apart longer narratives and hanging portraits in their place:<\/p>\n

surrender, the homeless did not run, but the dead
\nflew in a silver stream that night, their silk
\nhair thundered and their heels crushed
\nthe bissy nuts and ceramic roofs;
\nthe night had the scent of cut grass
\nsprayed with poison, the night smelled
\nof bullets, the moon did not hide,
\nthe prisoners prayed in their bunkers,
\nthe baby drank milk while its mother slept,
\nand by the window its father
\ncould not part the curtains.<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

Reviewers of House of Lords and Commons<\/em> have worked to place just how his poems strike the ear, coining phrases that stretch from: \u2018post-postcolonial poet\u2019, \u2018Miltonic graffiti\u2019, \u2018punk-baroque\u2019 and \u2018brat-belletristic\u2019. His lines might bend toward Milton (not sure about the graffiti), but you can just as easily hear Baudelaire in his cities, or Thomas in his breathless lines. What his blend of the contemporary and classical, past and present, does do is give his poems a peculiar sense of timelessness \u2013 a space where ghosts, and the living, seem both lost and alive.<\/p>\n

A spell that is, in this collection, only occasionally broken.<\/p>\n

Hutchinson is far better at evoking emotion than he is at naming them. Where \u2018cold nerve of iron\u2019 carries a real charge, marrying jealousy with \u2018thunder\u2019, or wish with \u2018simple\u2019, fall flat.<\/p>\n

Dan Chiasson, of the New Yorker<\/em>, was right to wince at alliterative runs like \u2018boning burlesque in the bower\u2019. A poem like \u2018Marking in Venice\u2019 is more of a misstep, where Hutchinson is Midas with his own mythic and thematic concerns, where the speaker sees Desdemonas \/ everywhere, clutching skirts wilding in the wind\u2019 and \u2018a waiter crashes \/ his shield tray in the horde and is swallowed \/ by the hydra\u2019. Occasionally, a poem, like \u2018Moved by the Beauty of Trees\u2019, just sounds like a Stevens\u2019 cover:<\/p>\n

The beauty of the trees still her;
\nshe is stillness staring at the leaves,<\/p>\n

still and green and keeping up the sky;
\ntheir beauty stills her and he is quiet<\/p>\n

in her stare, her eyes\u2019 long lashes curve
\nand keep, her little mouth opens<\/p>\n

and keeps still with its quiet for the beauty
\nof the trees, their leaves, the sky<\/p><\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

\u2018I heard them cry\u2014the peacocks.\u2019 <\/em>This is hardly an indictment, only one indication that Hutchinson is an overtly literary poet with a \u2018go big or go home\u2019 sensibility. Hutchinson\u2019s style, for the most part, seems every bit his own, and if the leap in quality between collections is testament to anything, it\u2019s that he\u2019s a poet still engaged in perfecting his craft. In the unpublished book of poet\u2019s favourite written things, we would find under Hutchinson: clementine, tangerine, sea, stars, and night. His collection dwells on things lit from the inside, and much of it reads as if it, too, is inwardly lit \u2013 \u2018the furnace in (his) father\u2019s voice\u2019, or amazed skull of the dead poet in \u2018Phaeton\u2019:<\/p>\n

if they had known any poet\u2014they would
\nhave stopped him before the sun burst
\nfrom his fingers, scattering glass beads.<\/p>\n

They found him with an empty third eye
\nthe bullet drilled into his forehead, a deaf
\nhole, knowing only its darkness there
\nin the parched-grass field; flies whirred
\na sun-chariot\u2019s axle-songs; heat rose a mirror
\nbefore his skull, and his mouth opened,
\namazed to this mask, its bleached stillness,
\nlike a stone lit from the inside, faded,
\na moon marked in the dust\u2014at this face,
\nhis mouth opened, amazed, stayed open.<\/p><\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

The House of Lord and Commons<\/em>, like many first and second collections, is a reckoning on two levels: one, with the landscapes of childhood and adolescence in poems that attempt to speak with, and put the dead to rest, in the pursuit of a life and identity the speaker can call their own; the second, a reckoning with language \u2013 mining influence, as they did with memory, for what will become their own voice: a place, as Heaney said, \u2018where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew\u2019. What distinguishes Hutchinson is the skill with which he widens the circumference of those concerns to include a wider, communal colonial history, and to undertake that reckoning with a tongue both mother and colonial. Hutchinson gives voice to the landscapes, histories, and figures of his home \u2013 claiming, from the \u2018dismantled music\u2019 of history, a powerful poetry of his own.<\/p>\n

Chad Campbell<\/h5>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ishion Hutchinson, House of Lord and Commons, (Faber & Faber, \u00a312.99). Ishion Hutchinson\u2019s second book, House of Lords and Commons, was published by FSG in America, and released here, in the U.K., by Faber & Faber in November. The book\u2019s reputation precedes it: winner of a National Book Critic Circle Award and top of sever […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nIshion Hutchinson, House of Lord and Commons, reviewed by Chad Campbell - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=8832\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Ishion Hutchinson, House of Lord and Commons, reviewed by Chad Campbell - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Ishion Hutchinson, House of Lord and Commons, (Faber & Faber, \u00a312.99). 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