School of Instructions

Hutchinson’s potent, memorializing third collection (after House of Lords and Commons) is written in “contrapuntal versets,” to use his term, that blend the fates of volunteer soldiers from the West Indies serving in WWI with the experiences of Godspeed, a boy growing up in Jamaica in the 1990s. The soldiers’ travails begin “ice-scarred, off to Albion,” taking them to the heart of the Middle Eastern theater of war, “stalled in the holy metal of the sun.” In tandem, as Hutchinson adeptly blends time and events to create a lexically rich, glintingly lyric set of counterpoints, Godspeed reveals a “passion for his Britannica,” often lit up by his “jam jar of fireflies.” Deepened by reflections on empire and religion, there is a biblical weight to Hutchinson’s account of the “Wild butchery of souls [that] blossomed in the desert,” its note of Ecclesiasticus struck with moving effect: “some there be which have no memorial.” These vigorous poems are an epitaph for overlooked combatants and a way of honoring the long shadows cast by a post-colonial inheritance. (Nov.)