By Jim Kates

Jamaican poet Ishion Hutchinson’s New-World, nonwhite perspective claims its own stake in a history that we have come too much to associate with its imperialist heavyweights.

School of Instructions: A Poem by Ishion Hutchinson. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 112 pages, $26 (hardcover).

All literature is a conversation with those present and a correspondence with those absent. Sometimes that correspondence is explicit, and sometimes it is only hinted at. The Welshman David Jones’s erudite and idiosyncratic In Parenthesis is one of the classics of the literature of the First World War. In his long poem School of Instructions, Ishion Hutchinson lets us know clearly, both directly and indirectly (even in the calligraphy of the cover design) how directly he is engaging with Jones’s earlier poem. So it is not inappropriate to approach Hutchinson by way of Jones, or, as Hutchinson himself writes “. . . In parenthesis, / the finical chase lured through history.”

What Jones wrote about his own work can serve also as an introduction to Hutchinson’s: “I have written it in a kind of space between.” School of Instruction narrates two stories with a space between: the progress of West Indian soldiers with British officers through Ottoman Palestine during the Great War, and the trying experience of a Jamaican teen-aged boy named Godspeed in school in the 1990s, a separate peace as it were. The stories are tangled in fragmented prose poems:

 

Disembarked for ALEXANDRIA shuck camp and enchained at MOASCAR and

       proceeded to EL FERDAN where it dechained and proceeded to REDUIT

       CAMP where it encamped and took over duties and post defenses in the sun.

 

He weighed the school’s ungodly name: Happy Grove: an old cow pasture that

       once possessed the dispossessing Scottish Quaker founders. He weighed the

       name and found much wanting.

 

The strength of the battalion stood at 328 officers and 5321 other ranks.

 

Like Jones, Hutchinson also layers generations of allusion from classical and Biblical sources. But his New-World, nonwhite perspective claims its own stake in a history that we have come too much to associate with its imperialist heavyweights.

(By appropriating Jones, Hutchinson not only casts us back to Wales’s own difficult relationship with the British Empire, but also forward into the argument of “appropriation” itself: Does a specific style belong to a specific culture, or is it part of a universal discourse?)

Hutchinson graphically reflects another famous World War I text — Hemingway’s novel Farewell to Arms: “Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.” All — and only –names of places are written in full capitals, as if to give concrete expression to Hemingway’s bitter truth.

Within all the erudite trickery is humanity, ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny:

 

Once on the way from school he collapsed into a sandpit and his breath frayed

     into the hoarse final words of an apostle. But Horace stretched out a hand and

     pulled Goodspeed from death. Then they journeyed up to BATH FOUNTAIN

     where Horace sopped his cousin’s chest with the hot mineral water which

     a century ago healed a runaway slave’s wound.

 

A hundred years ago we learned to read this fragmented Modernist writing patiently, even if it is a little out of fashion these days. It does require the reader to enter into the process of weaving and reweaving individual stories and historical perspective. This is not easy reading, but it’s un-easy in a way that rewards the effort. It is remarkable how many vignettes come alive in Goodspeed’s schooling from so little text, to the point that we might suspect an autobiographical note — “Goodspeed’s birth defect name of Ishi” — while the World War activity is expressed like a log book, punctuated regularly by death in battle, death by execution, death by inadvertence.

 

Proceeded to GIBEAH where No. 1996 Pte. O. Harris who carried sassafras

      twigs mint leaves foxglove flowers and sheaves of tobacco in a sachet in

      his pocket detonated into thousands and thousands of moths. And the

      curtains of MIDIAN did tremble.

 

And then, in the last two sections, shifting into more conventional verse, Hutchinson gives us a coda to his stories, an elegy for “some . . . which have no memorial . . . and are become as though they had never been born.” The poet recreates imaginatively and poignantly the generation of his World War I Jamaican battalion and ends with specific recognition of the West Indian soldiers by name, returning us to Jones, who offers a virtually identical memorial to “ALL COMMON & HIDDEN MEN” at the opening of In Parenthesis.

Don’t get me wrong. It is possible to read School of Instruction comfortably and profitably without reference to In Parenthesis, but the correspondence enriches both volumes and draws the reader into a literary adventure doubly mapped through time and space, with a circularity that brings us back from the end to a beginning.

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J. Kates is a poet, feature journalist and reviewer, literary translator, and the president and co-director of Zephyr Press, a nonprofit press that focuses on contemporary works in translation from Russia, Eastern Europe, and Asia. His latest book of poetry is Places of Permanent Shade (Accents Publishing) and his newest translation is Sixty Years Selected Poems: 1957-2017, the works of the Russian poet Mikhail Yeryomin.