In a small seaside community in Senegal, a visiting Hutchinson is led by an old fisherman past the open doors of a maternity hospital. Inside, women in various stages of labor can be seen. Perhaps only a poet can subtly suggest birth as a fugitive act, a flight from the womb, inchoate and undeveloped but suggested by this collection’s title and the thematic thread of the fugitive strung from essay to essay as metaphor and synonym–stand-ins for the word fugitive: reverie, expatriate, runaway, a musical note or line of poetry as in his essay entitled The Search for a Faun.

Writing about a bust of Frederick Douglass, Hutchinson refers to the orator’s stint in Newcastle upon Tyne, biding time until his freedom is purchased, and he can return to the United States. In a reflection on Claude McKay comparing his expatriatism with James Baldwin’s, Hutchinson is situated to watch the Barbadian poet Kamau Braithwaite, who, lost in thought before the statue of Garibaldi in Washington Square in New York City, does not see Hutchinson as he imagines Braithwaite musing on his escape from his colonized past and the home he loves.

Meanwhile, Derek Walcott glances from his Carribean home at European poetry, a poetic tradition tilted to describe his island life in his own poetry as the young Hutchinson’s fugitive reveries of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island tilt back to the reality and imagination of his own Jamaica in homage to Walcott, interviewed by Hutchinson in another piece of fugitive writing. From Walcott he learns to transmute his island life into art comparable to art created in the historical art capitals of the world. Hutchinson describes the beginnings of his classical education as a student living in poverty in Jamaica, his Shakespearean studies, and in an essay comparing from a painting found in a book in a local library of Vuillard’s mother with Hutchinson’s Jamaican grandmother. A professor gifts him with classical cds while in an interview Hutchinson discusses forms of Jamaican music, reggae, tambu, dub, and ska.

Hutchinson succeeds in keeping all these fugitive strands and more together in elegant classical prose, bringing him to the unavoidable question, the title and topic of another essay, The Classics Can Console? Certainly, music of the people, wherever found in the world, of all cultures, does. As for the classics, Hutchinson wants you to read Carribean poets and novelists.

Thank you to the publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley for an ARC.