A stunning memorial work that excavates the forgotten experience of
West Indian soldiers during World War I.
Deep-dyed in a language that is sensuous and biblical in proportion, School
of Instructions centers on the experience of West Indian volunteer soldiers in
British regiments during World War I. The poem gathers the psychic and
physical terrors of these Black soldiers in the Middle East war theater and
refracts their struggle against the colonial power they served. Simultaneity
abounds: the narratives of the soldiers overlap with that of Godspeed, a young
schoolboy living in rural Jamaica of the 1990s. This visionary collision, written
in a form Ishion Hutchinson calls contrapuntalversets," unsettles time and
event. It reshapes grand gestures of heroism into a music of supple, vigilant
intensity. Elegiac and odic, epochal and lyrical, the triumph of School of
Instructions is how it confronts the legacy of imperial silencing and etches
shards of remembrances into a form of survival.
Ishion Hutchinsonwas born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of the
poetry collections Far District, winner of the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, and
House of Lords and Commons, which was awarded the National Book Critics
Circle Award in Poetry. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the
Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize, and the Whiting Writers Award. Hutchinson is an
associate professor of English at Cornell University.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
On Sale: Nov 21/23
5.38 x 8.25 • 112 pages
9780374610265 • $35.00 • CL - With dust jacket
Poetry / Caribbean & Latin American