School of Instructions

"Ishion Hutchinson’s School of Instructions defies category—not with philosophy or doctrine, but through illuminating imagery and pace. And, here, the reader must be ready to engage a deeper truth this work brings to light, which seems to be asking through innuendo, Were Jamaican troops fighting in the Middle East during the First World War silenced? What at first may seem symbolic and totemic grows into a profound language embodying a rhythm that is cultural and personal. The subtle details—the officers are British and the Caribbean soldiers, low-ranking fodder dying in the name of the crown—become haunting brushstrokes on a tonal canvas. The poet’s dynamic characters, especially Godspeed, Count Lasher, and Pipecock Jackson, grow instructional when exposing the underbelly of history and folklore. Lived and ritualized through a satire where magical realism resides, this voice betokens more than a bloody enterprise of war in the desert. This poet shows how a sense of place travels as images of home and voices in the head and heart; dreams of the Caribbean Sea become overlays upon maps of sandy battlefields. Such realities are embedded throughout School of Instructions, and in this sense the title is the first trope of irony in a masterful work." —Yusef Komunyakaa, author of Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth

"Ishion Hutchinson's School of Instructions honors the volunteers of the British West Indies Regiment who fought as colonial subjects in the Middle Eastern theater from 1916 to 1918 and later returned home to join the struggle for independence. Hutchinson draws on all the conventions of epic—the proper names and epitaphs, the lists, the materiel, the violence—only to undo them. Instead he reveals the striking language and singular consciousness of his protagonists as they make their way through an ancient landscape they already know as shaped by eternity. By its end, this moving, humane, long poem floods the reader with a sense of their living presence and destiny." —Susan Stewart, author of The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture

“‘Source of echo / madman of prophecies,’ chants the over-voice in Ishion Hutchinson’s majestic School of Instructions. That’s how this lyric-epic works, picking up signals from the Bible, Blake, David Jones’s In Parenthesis, Geoffrey Hill, and Jamaican dub music. To honor the West Indian soldiers who fought for England in the Great War, Hutchinson splices the memory of the Black soldiers into the story of Godspeed, his modern Jamaican ‘boyself’ enduring thrashings at his ‘school of instructions.’ With this radical poem, Hutchinson leaps into the ranks of the visionary company.” —Rosanna Warren, author of So Forth