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    House of Lords and Commons: Poems
    House of Lords and Commons: Poems
    House of Lords and Commons: Poems
    Ebook80 pages1 hour

    House of Lords and Commons: Poems

    By Ishion Hutchinson

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    About this ebook

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateSep 20, 2016
    ISBN9780374714543
    House of Lords and Commons: Poems
    Author

    Ishion Hutchinson

    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, 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 a Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prize, among honors.

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      Book preview

      House of Lords and Commons - Ishion Hutchinson

      STATION

      The train station is a cemetery.

      Drunk with spirits, a man enters. I fan gnats

      from my eyes to see into his face. Father!

      I shout and stumble. He does not budge.

      After thirteen years, neither snow nor train,

      only a few letters, and twice, from a cell,

      his hoarfrost accent crossed the Atlantic.

      His mask slips a moment as in childhood,

      pure departure, a gesture of smoke.

      Along freighted crowds the city punished,

      picking faces in the thick nest of morning’s

      hard light that struck raw and stupid,

      searching, and in the dribble of night commuters,

      I have never found him, wandering the almond

      trees’ shadows, since a virus disheartened

      the palms’ blossoms and mother gave me the sheaves

      in her purse so he would remember her

      and then shaved her head to a nut.

      I talk fast of her in one of my Cerberus

      voices, but he laughs, shaking the scales

      of froth on his coat. The station’s cold

      cracks a hysterical congregation;

      his eyes flash little obelisks that chase the spirits

      out, and, without them, wavering, I see

      nothing like me. Stranger, father, cackling

      rat, who am I transfixed at the bottom

      of the station? Pure echo in the train’s

      beam arriving on its cold nerve of iron.

      FITZY AND THE REVOLUTION

      The rumour broke first in Duckenfield.

      Fitzy dropped the shutters of his rum shop.

      By the time it got to Dalvey there were three suicides.

      The mechanic in Cheswick heard and gave his woman

      a fine trashing; but, to her credit, she nearly scratched his heart

      out his chest during the howl and leather smithing.

      The betting shops and the whorehouse Daylights

      at Golden Grove were empty; it was brutal

      to see the women with their hands at their jaws on the terrace;

      seeing them you know the rumour was not rumour,

      the rumour was gospel: the cane cutters did not get their

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