Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of the poetry collections Far District, which won the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, and House of Lords and Commons, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize in Literature, the Whiting Award, and the Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry, among other honours.
Judges’ Citation
School of Instructions is a transcendent hybridic feast of a book, an innovative condensed epic comprising startling poetry, primary sources, Biblical naming and mapping, and a haunting trajectory of the British Empire’s Middle Eastern campaigns of WWI juxtaposed with 20th century Jamaica.
Primordial elementals are here: we are by the sea, in the desert, in the trenches, in the mind of a schoolchild discovering ‘natural’ history, in vibrant daily life, in anabasis of war, and studying the innocent volunteers going to disease and slaughter. School of Instructions is a transcendent hybridic feast of a book, an innovative condensed epic comprising startling poetry, primary sources, Biblical naming and mapping, and a haunting trajectory of the British Empire’s Middle Eastern campaigns of WWI juxtaposed with 20th century Jamaica. Hutchinson’s brilliant transmission is deeply intuitive and profound as scholarly and poetic gnosis—you feel instructed by the ongoing koan, coil, knot of colonialism ingrained with civilization.
Selected poems
by Ishion Hutchinson
The battalion proceeded to MILLO to fortify the old city
walls. In the middle of a marl road snaking between
tall canes Godspeed met Pipecock Jackxon wearing a
necklace of two flattened Coca-Cola corks sweat stuck
to his chest. Urim and Thummim he called them. Seven
John crows flagged out of SOKHO when he strung the
corks around the boy’s neck.
Then to the clashing silver green sound of the canes he said:
“I Pipecock Jackxon Jack Lightning Jesse the Hammer
Lee Scratch Perry Daniel Dandelion the Lion I am the
flying fish. I boom Death and I boom debts and I bust
bets and I win bets and I sin Death and I kill Death with
my fate lock. Behold! I conquer Hell with my Merry
Christmas bells. I am a walking talking time boom.
Dandelion the King of ZION.”
Copyright © 2023 by Ishion Hutchinson, School of Instructions, Faber & Faber / Farrar, Straus & Giroux
LI
- Ishion Hutchinson’s Website
- “I can hear a poem before it arrives”: Interview The Guardian
- Ishion Hutchinson speaks about School of Instructions T. S. Eliot Prize