• 30 Books in 30 Days: House of Lords and Commons

    Tess Taylor on Ishion Hutchinson's Poetry Collection

    In the 30 Books in 30 Days series leading up to the March 16 announcement of the 2016 National Book Critics Circle award winners, NBCC board members review the thirty finalists. Today, NBCC board member Tess Taylor offers an appreciation of poetry finalist Ishion Hutchinson’s House of Lords and Commons (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

    House of Lords And Commons was one of my favorite books this year. It is ragged and fiercely beautiful. Its double-edged language is inviting and unsettling. Tracing the landscapes of memory, childhood and his native Jamaica, Hutchinson’s poems are the skeins a thinker makes of trouble, inequality, global travel, lost time. Hutchinson’s got a gift for syntax. Many of his poems string a single, side-winding sentence into a shimmering thread that shuttles between the past and the present, the haves and the have nots, outrage and beauty.

    In a poem about cane workers called “Fitzy and the Revolution,” Hutchinson writes, “Cane cutters who filed their spines against the sun bringing down great walls of cane… // Every year the same men, different cane, and when different men, / the same cane.” This poetry compresses witness, and soon Hutchinson turns his razor-sharp gaze on a nearby fortress where a character called the “Minister of All” cannot sleep. “The flags stiffened on the embassy building but / did not fall when the machine guns / flared and reminded that stars were inside / the decrepit towns, in shanty zinc holes, / staring at the fixed constellation…”

    These poems are lighthouse beams that concentrate fervor and anger. It’s a kind of concentration we might all wish to summon as we each try to name the world we now live in and look for the world we want to see next. “I became a thicket of ears,” Hutchinson writes. Listening to him, we do, too.


    Tess Taylor
    Tess Taylor
    Tess Taylor, an avid gardener, is the author of five acclaimed collections of poetry including Work & Days, which was named one of the ten best books of poetry of 2016 by the New York Times. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, Tin House, The Times Literary Supplement, CNN, and the New York Times. Taylor has been Distinguished Fulbright US Scholar at the Seamus Heaney Centre in Queen’s University in Northern Ireland, and the Anne Spencer Poet-in-Residence at Randolph College. She has also served as on-air poetry reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered for over a decade. Taylor lives in El Cerrito, California, where she tends to fruit trees and backyard chickens.





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