In an elegiac essay on the late Caribbean poet Derek Walcott, Ishion Hutchinson recounts finding Walcott’s poem “Landfall, Grenada” in his local library at the age of 16. Reading in the half-light of evening, the budding poet is galvanised by Walcott’s forceful image of the “blown canes”. These revelatory, sharp words are loaded with the violent history of plantation slavery. Indeed, a ubiquity of cane, the sugar trade of empire and transatlantic slavery inform the landscapes of Hutchinson’s second collection, House of Lords and Commons. But they do not define his subject.
Like his first, more autobiographical collection, Far District, published by Peepal Tree, Hutchinson’s second book expands on experiences from his Jamaican childhood. In the opening poem, “Station”, an absent “stranger, father” is greeted by his son, the “Cerberus”-voiced speaker.
The reader is transported from ancient Mesopotamia to the horrors of the “whipped backs” of slaves
In the voice of a seafarer, the speaker once more draws upon the age-old dialectic of conqueror and victim
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