House of Lords and Commons: Poems

by Ishion Hutchinson

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.

Genres: Poetry, Fiction, Contemporary, Literature, Literary Fiction

96 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 20, 2016

About the author

Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of the poetry collections, Far District: Poems (Peepal Tree Press, 2010) and House of Lords and Commons (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016). He teaches in the graduate writing program at Cornell University and is a contributing editor to the literary journals The Common and Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art.

Reviews

[Roxane · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can tell this is excellent and brilliantly composed poetry but I simply didn't connect to the work. I didn't feel smart enough to understand any of the poems.

[Roger DeBlanck · Rating 4 out of 5]

For a volume that demands multiple readings and much patience to absorb, Hutchinson's oftentimes abstruse poems, nonetheless, compulsively draw you back to the challenge of understanding their complexity. His verses are densely constructed with rich and beautiful language, and when you begin to piece together the puzzle of his vision, the message can be both endearing and haunting. At their core, many of the poems attest to anguish from Hutchinson's personal past and over the condition of his home country of Jamaica. Longing and lamentation are dominant reflections throughout the poems, and the vivid imagery allows you to feel the Caribbean's lure of the sea and the intensity of its sun.

In the excellent lead poem "Station," Hutchinson envisions his absent father's appearance in a crowded station. But his imagining is for naught when the memory becomes "Pure echo in the train's / beam arriving on its cold nerve of iron." In a well-crafted narrative poem such as "Fitzy and the Revolution," he charts the fury of cane workers who have gone unpaid and demand their wages. Instead, their inclination for violence dissolves into reason, and they merely want to drown their sorrow with rum at Fitzy's shop. "Bicycle Eclogue" is another strong memory piece, where Hutchinson recalls the pain of a hand injury he experienced while falling off his bike. He reconstructs the subsequent tender moments he shared with his mother as she took him to receive medical care.

"Punishment" is one of the volume's most confessional pieces. Hutchinson blames himself for not having more reverence for the dead and "for my rejection / of things past." He goes on to explain the guilt he feels for not doing more to understand "the green graves / by the chapel." Other pieces such as "The Garden" deal with violence during a police crackdown, and "The Difference" confronts the world's many problems by considering how money, oil, greed, and indifference are the chief causes. "A Farther Shore" deals with race and inequality, while "The Ark by 'Scratch'" tackles the dynamics of history, mythology, colonialism, and the idea of Biblical apocalypse against the reality of now. The destructive nature of war is addressed in "October's Levant," and in the "The Wanderer" he captures the volatility of history's haunting presence. With a brilliant metaphor, he describes how "history is that rusty anchor holding no ship in bay . . ."

The damaging legacy of colonialism continues in "Marking in Venice," where Hutchinson addresses the vestiges of historical crimes and describes how they resonate as "just hate's old transfiguration, language's / treason, the savage cause carved in stone." In the latter half of the book, "Small Fantasia: Light Years" can be seen as a culmination of all the pain, and it allows Hutchinson to answer his own question: "What is terrifying about happiness? / Happiness." Taking in this diverse volume can be difficult, but Hutchinson's talent is unquestionable in the range and intensity of his vision, which he steeps with references and allusions both obvious and arcane. I detect Walcott, Heaney, and Olds among some of his influences, and it is no stretch to place Hutchinson's work in their company.

[Kiki · Rating 5 out of 5]

I accidentally finished it. *starts over*

[Pamela Laskin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just finished reading wonderful poetry book, HOUSE OF LORDS AND COMMONS by Ishion Hutchinson, born in Jamaica, and an assistant professor at Cornell University. Talk about language that slices through the skin; his diction is stark, challenging, dark, haunting, lyrical, and lovely. I love his rage against politics, his poignant understanding of tenderness and fatherhood. There is wonderful irony and edgy violence, but his authenticity makes this an amazingly beautiful book. A must read!

[Andy Oram · Rating 5 out of 5]

For these poems, the author painstakingly assembled memories of places he has grown up, lived in, and traveled to, along with acerbic political and social observations and incredibly rich metaphor. "Don't get too hung up on the terms," as he says in "A March." I didn't untangle every phrase, but I found much of the book moving, and had to sit quietly for a while after the end. Most effective to me was a poem late in the book where Hutchinson softens his modernist style for a more prose-poem approach, "The Night Autobiographies of Leopold Dice."

[Rick · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is Hutchinson’s second collection. I will be right back. Have to go get his first collection, Far District, because this is one talented young poet. (Back. Got it.) Hutchinson is Jamaica born and raised but a resident of the United States since 2006. House of Lords and Commons deservedly won the National Book Critics award for poetry in a year when great poetry seems to be as ample as apples in a blessed autumn harvest. (When you compare short lists of those who give out national poetry prizes you can find no fault with who is on any list, and the lists hardly overlap, but there are more you can name worthy of consideration. For example, I would have been happy to award one or more prizes to Camille Rankine’s superb Incorrect Merciful Impulses.)

But back to Hutchinson. He had me with the beginning verse of the first poem. “The train station is a cemetery. / Drunk with spirits, a man enters. I fan gnats / from my eyes to see into his face. ‘Father!” A few lines later the stanza ends: “His mask slips a moment as in childhood, / pure departure, a gesture of smoke.” It’s not quite an illusion, the appearance of his father across time and continent, because the memory is real, the unfinished business substantial. The poem, “Station,” concludes, “…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.”

Themes of abandonment, alienation, and past haunting present are established early. The past, as they say, is not even the past. It lives with us so a failure to meet payroll is not an inconvenience but a degradation, a return to slavery, worthy of rebellion.

“Better to crucify Christ again.
Slaughter newborns, strike down the cattle,
but to make a man not have money in his pocket on a payday
Friday was abomination itself; worse cane cutters,
who filed their spines against the sun, bringing down great walls of cane.

You’d shudder to see them, barebacked men, kissing
the earth, so to slash away the roots of the canes;
every year the same men, different cane, and when different men,
the same cane: the cane they cannot kill, living for this one day

of respite when they’d straighten themselves to pillars
and drop dollars on counters…”

The past lives with us as history and personally, our ghost of a father, the child in the schoolroom recalled, the names of the dead in a cemetery. It is where a red bicycle in Venice meets a childhood injury and a mother’s angry love, where the reach of dustbin plantations meet modern day resorts and a native son’s return swim. There are so many beautiful poems but here are two that speak to the last referenced connections of memory and moment.

“Bicycle Eclogue
That red bicycle left in an alley near the Ponte Vecchio,
I claim; I claim its elongated shadow, ship crested on
stacked crates; I claim the sour-mouth Arno and the stone
arch bending sunlight on varnished medieval fairs;
but mostly I claim this two-wheel chariot vetching
on the wall, its sickle fenders reaping dust and pollen
off the heat-congested city coiled to a halt in traffic.
And I, without enough for the great museums,
am struck by the red on the weathered brick, new tyres
on cobble, the bronze tulip bell—smaller than Venus’s nose—
turned up against the river, completely itself for itself.
The scar in my palm throbs, recalling a tiny stone
once stuck there after I fell off the district’s iron mule,
welded by the local artisan, Barrel Mouth—no relation
of Botticelli—the summer of my first long pants.
The doctor’s scissors probing my flesh didn’t hurt,
nor the lifeline bust open when the stone was plucked out;
what I wailed for that afternoon was the anger in mother’s
face when she found out I had disobeyed her simple wish
to remain indoors until she returned from kneeling
in the harvested cane, tearing out the charred roots
from the earth after cane cutters had slashed the burnt field.
It was her first day, and her last, bowing so low to pull
enough for my school fee; for, again, the promised money
didn’t fall from my father’s cold heaven in England.
As we walked to the clinic on a rabble of hogplums,
her mouth trembled in her soot frock, my palm reddened
in her grip, plum scent taking us through the lane.
By the time we saw the hospital’s rusty gate, her fist
was stained to my fingers’ curl, and when I unfastened
my eyes from the ground to her face, gazing ahead, terribly calm
in the hail of sunlight, a yellow shawl around her head,
something of shame became clear, and if I had more
sense as my blood darkened to sorrel at the age
of twelve or thirteen, I would have forgotten the sting
and wreathed tighter my hold before letting her go.
And now, as I raise my camera, bells charge the pigeon
sky braced by the Duomo, a shell fallen from the sun.
I kneel, snap the cycle, rise, hurry away.”

And:

“A Farther Shore / 1
By the shadowless lion-bluff of Pigeon
Island, you have gone swimming, a clear
afternoon, children’s faint play noises ring
in the yard by the hyphened church school near
century-old cafes, one with a zinc fence signed in comic
icons: ICE CREAM AND OTHER SUPPLIES,
scythes your sides with laughter, but they vanish
near the beach stretch, the piratical hoteliers’
paradise, a white army of luxury boats idled,
processional, waiting for the flare to blow
and ignite another plantation, without Bible
or chain, just the PM’s handshake and bow.
You ignore them for your first immersion.
The blue water whitens and collects you in its salt mine.”

Hutchinson’s voice is exquisite, his word choice as precise as the eye and hand of a master jeweler, and his intelligence vigorous and challenging of assumptions, particularly those that deny or put a chamber of commerce’s smile on the past. House of Lords and Commons is a brilliant work from a unique artist.

[Ario · Rating 5 out of 5]

That final poem, those final lines.

Ishion Hutchinson is one of the few contemporary poets who make me slow down and really sit with a poem. A poem should reveal itself over time. I can really appreciate a writer who trusts their readership to do the work and/or bring something to the table. Having said that, you don’t need to; the ‘erudite’ allusions are there to chase down or prick your memory, but the joy lies in the musicality and vividness of the language, the surprising syntax, the pushing of linguistic boundaries. Poetry is also about a love for language and its possibilities; there’s plenty of that and, to my casual first read, it’s all firmly rooted in the poet’s perception and experience, which, however different from mine, I really felt I could connect with.

[Brendan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started this in 2016.

[Joan Colby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Powerful, often devastating poems like the elegy in five parts: October’s Levant, reveal Hutchinson as a poet of realized promise. His imagery evokes the islands of the Caribbean
“October, inconsolable, the asphalt
Bordering the seagrass, warm and silver
In the blazing afternoon, so I know
I am alive and you are not.”

There are poems that confront inequality
“the abomination
Opulence to squalor, worsening never the inverse” (The Difference)

Hutchinson knows how to end a poem memorably
“the blue water whitens and collects you in its salt mine” (A Farther Shore)
“the train’s
beam arriving on its cold nerve of iron” (Station).
The horror of Phaeton
“an empty third eye
The bullet drilled into his forehead.”

These are poems informed by myth and history; poems that don’t dodge the elaboration of language, but welcome incantations like
“steel fronds of unsheathed Christianity speared
the soul of the arrowroot and wild maize and erected bells
rid the clanging shells of their healing.”

The music that invests each line is classical, symphonic, at times operatic.
Finally, the masterly title poem
“a furnace in my father’s voice, I prayed for the coal-stove’s
roses, a cruise ship lit like a castle
on fire in the harbor, we never walked,
Father and son…”

The passion in the lines
“Light sprinkled my hair; I rejoiced, a poui
tree hit by the sun in the room,
A man, a man”
Which concludes
“a herd of darkness gathering to passage unto Shiloh,
where the Lord of Summer lives
kindling a coal fire.”

A native of Jamaica, Hutchison is a worthy successor to the islander Derek Walcott
And we may expect more celebrated volumes from him.

[Cris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading poetry again after so long felt like waking up a part of my brain I forgot about. This poetry collection isn’t soft or easy. It is pretty heavy and layered with history and loss. There are 35 poems in total. Some of the poems cut deep. Others felt like puzzles I couldn’t quite solve. A few just left me sitting there, letting the words sink in. It reminded me that poetry isn’t about instant understanding but about feeling something. And this collection definitely made me feel something.

⭐Standouts for me were:

▪️ Prelude To The Afternoon Of A Faun - feels like a fever dream where past and present crash into each other. It’s nodding to Debussy’s piece of the same name, but instead of dreamy, delicate notes, Hutchinson spin is darker and more primal.
▪️ October's Levant - reflects on loss, survival, and the emotional impact of conflict. It explores the scars left by history.
▪️Sibelius And Marley - reflects on how music shapes and connects us to our past and ourselves
▪️The Wanderer - looks at the idea of being displaced, both physically and emotionally, & the struggle to find home.
▪️The Lords And Commons Of Summer - delves into time, change, & the differences between wealth & hardship
▪️After Pompeii - is about loss & how to deal with the aftermath of destruction and tragedy
▪️Sprawl - covers themes of urbanization. It’s a reflection on the cost of progress

[Bryce Emanuel · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars! This is an interesting read, and had to pick and put down because it is not a poetry book you breeze through! Funnily enough, I read this when I was applying to college and wanted to go to Cornell where Ishion Hutchinson teaches. Hutchinson, pushes you to reread the lines he has laid out, and even in my cursory reading with minimal searching for context of the references used, the poems in here are powerful. I also had a little bit more context than your average bear, seeing as one half of my family is Jamaican. The crux of Hutchinson’s poetry in this collection is dichotomy, how simply comparing something after an occurrence is framing your perspective on what occurred. It’s saying much more about you than it is the current circumstances. When I thought more of the title, I found that this a book about the author themself, but also their roots. the body is both separate and a part of the environment of the land, which also means colonialism will always be inextricably tied to our history, and our story now. Poems I think you should check out from this book are “Station”, “Fitzy and the Revolution”, “The Bicycle Ecologue”, “The Arc By “Scratch”” “The Night Autobiographies of Leopold Dice”, and “The Small Dark Interior”.

[Kelly · Rating 2 out of 5]

The March

Lesson of the day: Syria and Styria.
For Syria, read: His conquering banner shook from Syria.
And for Styria: Look at this harp of  blood, mapping.

Now I am tuned. I am going to go above
my voice for the sake of the forest shaken
on the bitumen. You can see stars in the skulls,

winking, synapses, intermittent, on edge
of shriek — perhaps a cluster of fir, birches? — 
Anyways. Don’t get too hung up

on the terms; they have entropy
in common, bad for the public weal,
those obtuse centurions in the flare

of the bougainvillea, their patent-seeking
gift kindled. Divers speech. Cruelty.
Justice. Never mind, but do

pay attention to the skirmish — the white
panther that flitters up the pole — 
its shade grows large on the ground

Though Mr. Hutchinson is not my bag, there is a definite talent that you have thus far been missing out on. I encourage you to check out his work!

[Craig Werner · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's enough here to keep me interested in Hutchinson's development, but the collection didn't quite come together for me. There are echoes of many other Caribbean writers--the contrast between the tropics and the US North that extends back at least to Claude McKay--the sense of a conflicted history embedded in family relationships. Hutchinson mixes in some interesting cross-references between the European-American and Afro-Caribbean traditions, notably in "Sibelius and Marley." Both "After the Hurricane" and "A Small Dark Interior" suggest social and psychological depths that could be more fully explored. And "The Orator" is an absolutely blistering assault on the hypocrisies of academic post-colonialism.

But for the most part the poems felt a bit professional to me, compilations of images that can be worked into pieces that could be much more individual.

[Micah Winters · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hutchinson's poems dance through immense fields of language and allusion, vibrating with intellectual prowess. At times, the fierce intensity of their composition tips them into overwriting or distanced inscrutability; it took me a good while to "get" their style, to adapt to the the rhythms of this collection. But the closer (and slower) I looked, the more frequently my experience shifted from disengagement to astonishment. The moments of mastery here make the whole collection worth it: "History is dismantled music; slant, / bleak on gravel. One amasses silence, / another chastises silence with nettles, / stinging ferns. I oscillate in their jaws" ("Sibelius and Marley"). It's a tremendously muscular work, intelligent to a fault, a singular and noteworthy engagement (it seems) with Walcott's legacy.

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is difficult to summarize all that Ishion Hutchinson reveals and draws out of you as a reader. While much of this volume conjures Jamaica and British history, there are brilliant excursions such as:
"That red bicycle left in an alley near the Ponte Vecchio,/ I claim; I claim its elongated shadow, ship crested on/ stacked crates; I claim the sour-mouth Arno and the stone/ arch bending sunlight on vanished medieval fairs;/ but mostly I claim this two-wheel chariot vetching/ on the wall, its sickle fenders reaping dust and pollen/ off the heat-congested city coiled to a halt in traffic."

[Juliano · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ishion Hutchinson’s ‘House of Lords and Commons’ made me break my de facto rule of not buying Faber poetry in hardback (it upsets the unity of my poetry shelf) and I’m kind of glad it did. This is on the whole a masterful collection, full of distinct poems that flow discretely from one to the next, so that you never question their cohesion until you discern the distance from start to finish. Mostly it’s the unexpected expressions and controlled pace that makes these poems readable yet jarring, a nuanced, individual foray into worlds, internal and external, of inequality.

[Wuttipol✨ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Moved by the Beauty of Trees

The beauty of the trees stills her;
she is stillness staring at the leaves,

still and green and keeping up the sky;
their beauty stills her and she is quiet

in her stare, her eyes’ long lashes curve
and keep, her little mouth opens

and keeps still with its quiet for the beauty
of the trees, their leaves, the sky

and its blue quiet, very still and quiet;
her looking eyes wide, deep, silent

hard on the trees and the beauty
of the sky, the green of the leaves.

[Jee Koh · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I told NJ that I was writing a series of poems in the voice of a Jamaican transplant to America, she recommended Ishion Hutchinson's House of Lords and Commons, and Safiya Sinclair's Cannibal. The Hutchinson is marvelous, a lyricism that is always surprising, precise, and intelligent. I had to read it twice to understand what he is saying, but I wanted to read it a second time, and probably a third, because it was so musical. There is so little apology in it.

[Jacob Lehman · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't know if I'm not broadly read enough to fully appreciate this, but it was a little too obscure in a lot of places for my taste. That said, I loved the "Night autobiographies of Leopold Dice" and found some very cool phrases throughout the work. Considering my fondness for crossword puzzles, it's maybe surprising that I don't really care for poems where I feel like I'm guessing at the subject/meaning a lot.

[Laura Frey (Reading in Bed) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first read Hutchinson in The Happy Reader. His essay about reading Treasure Island as a child (on an island) was beautiful. Then I heard him read from this book on the Shakespeare and Company podcast. Then I read this. I think if I'd come to the book without that preparation, it wouldn't have made such an impression. Poetry is meant to be listened to, I'm convinced!

[Shanique Edwards · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the more dense poetry collections I've read. I'd appreciate the mastery of Hutchinson's poetry much more if I could place the numerous literary/classics references in the poems. I kept getting the sense that I was reading something rich and beautiful, but I couldn't quite grasp it.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

Borderline impenetrable. I could get glimpses, but the larger structures usually escaped me. When I got to The Ark, I went back and started fresh as I think that was the easiest to lock in to, the entry point for hearing him in his expressive mode.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'll be honest, much of the time I didn't entirely understand what was going on, vut that's often true with good art, and even when that was the case I still savoured the language, the soubds, the feel. Hutchinson is an excellent poet, and this was a real pleasure.

[Leila]

Light seethes

bulging like pipes blown with napalm

from his big golden eyes, turning

the afternoon ten degrees backwards,

then through palm fronds’ teething

the bridled air, sprigs of goat hair, fall.

[Mike Hammer · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lyrical collection of superb words and good rhythms, but the poems are a bit dense at points and not as straightforward as they could be. Some good lines and feelings tho.

[Douglas Forman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hutchinson's lyrics seemed dissonant to me. I couldn't pick up the flow or the music. I'll have to give his work another try.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting mixture of vernacular voice and traditional heightened poetic language.

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very talented young poet

[Prince Jhonny · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great mix of Walcottian lyrical storytelling with an immersive sense of place and cerebral explorations.

[Francescajemm · Rating 5 out of 5]

With the caveat that I think I will need to read this book at least ten more times to even begin to grapple with its technical dexterity, I’m in awe of the powerful language.