Ishion Hutchinson – författare

"The point of departure for the book Black Ark with Lee “Scratch” Perry (1936–2021),a Jamaican musical and visual artist who was based in Switzerland, is a detailedinventory of photographs and writings (Spring 2021) from the Black Ark Studios inKingston, Jamaica, where Lee produced his music from 1973 on. He was a seminalpioneer of dub, an electronic subgenre of reggae that uses sampling, looping,remixing, reverb and echoes to create new songs as well as rework and appropriatepre-recorded songs and tracks.Black Ark Studios was one of the cradles of dub. It’s also where Lee “Scratch”Perry’s musical approach found an enduring visual counterpart in the form ofcontinuously evolving mural paintings and drawings as well as shape-shiftingassemblages of records, instruments, found objects, posters, newspaper andmagazine clippings, and appropriated books. The artworks form actual layers uponlayers that are rhizomatically intertwined with the studio building itself as well as withthe furniture inside—and with Perry’s biography and persona.Perry created his very own, dense and eclectic world—a world that is documented inBlack Ark, before it disappears for good: the premises have recently been sold. Thephotographic documentation of the studio was supplemented by efforts to secure andpreserve Perry’s cultural objects as part of a joint project with various culturalinstitutions.Black Ark which reflects the rhythm and layering effects of collage both in its contentand the materials used to craft the book. Perry was involved in the conception of thebook in its early stages. It also interweaves various media and chronologies. The newphotographs of the Black Ark Studios will be juxtaposed with stills from olddocumentaries and archival photos.The idea of a “house” serves as both a working hypothesis and a metaphor. It will bethe starting point and endpoint of various thematic strands, both visual and textual:for example, the book will explore the Black Ark as a “spiritual yard” in the context ofAfrican diaspora, as well as looking into archeomusicological aspects. Furthermore,extended captions by Perry’s biographer will provide the backdrop for a kaleidoscopicpanorama of Perry’s eclectic and ingenious work."

'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

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

In language that is sensuous and biblical, School of Instructions centres on the experience of West Indian volunteer soldiers in British regiments during the First World War. The poem gathers the psychic and physical terrors of these Black soldiers in the Middle East war theatre and refracts their struggle against the colonial power they served. The narratives of the soldiers overlap with Godspeed, a young schoolboy living in rural Jamaica of the 1990s. This visionary collision, written in a form Ishion Hutchinson calls 'contrapuntal versets', 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.