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

'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