Fat District by Ishion Hutchinson

Far District: Poems

by Ishion Hutchinson

Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2024

There’s something perennially thrilling about literary debuts. Will the book fly or will it flop? Will it be just ho-hum? Each sentiment, when expressed by mouth, in print, or online, amounts to its own critical take. What’s to be avoided at all costs, the worst possible outcome for any first-timer, is to simply disappear, unnoticed in the moment and swiftly forgotten.

The name of the game is staying power. One strategy, particularly popular among ambitious debut novelists, calls for a mindless course of overlarding, treating the form as an exercise in trotting out reams of information, the higher the page count the better. Their guiding assumption—that literal weightiness equates to the figurative sort, itself an unreliable bar against summary extinction—cuts both ways: it takes real finesse to pretty up the proverbial kitchen sink.

Debut poets, for their part, have been known to drip their sweat over quieter exertions—something resembling the shuffling dance one performs in the privacy of a fitting room. All of which amounts to one of the few privileges available to those who continue to cleave to the new poetry: access to that vital space, provisional as anything, where a poet might just discover a style.

So much is true, at least, of Far District, Jamaican poet Ishion Hutchinson’s 2010 debut. A follow-up effort, 2016’s House of Lords and Commons, earned all kinds of admiration, and for good reason: its kinetic line and hardscrabble diction struck just the right balance between accessibility and depth (precisely the tightrope which most modern poets simply refuse to walk today). In comparison, Far District is, perhaps unavoidably, an uneven collection, characterized in part by the calculated misfires of a molting rookie, no matter how promising. At the same time—it can’t be missed—the book shivers with the germ of something exceptional, glowing with many of the stylistic lineaments present in Hutchinson’s later work. Now, in a new edition from FSG, the book’s first American printing, new readers will have the opportunity to make the acquaintance of a seriously talented contemporary poet.

Hutchinson was born and raised in Port Antonio, on the northeastern coast of Jamaica, so it’s appropriate that many of the book’s poems take place there. While the “far district” of the title sets its anchor down amid the city’s poorest neighborhoods—far from Wordsworth’s Cotswolds, to be sure—many of the poems are just as happy to take wing for another, colder northeast. Shuttling seamlessly between home and away, you never quite know where you’ll be when you turn the page. The sum of these oscillations is a keen sense of longing, which permeates the book.

Home itself happens to be a complicated place, where even the idyll of a glittering sea and an azure sky can’t be taken on faith, as witness the way the season’s hurricanes hang above the people’s heads like an eternally swirling sword of Damocles. In the book’s title poem, Hutchinson recalls the damage wrought by Gilbert in 2005. His subtle rendition is typical of the collection’s tone.

We found the crab-shell school broken,

playground mangled, spiked with zinc and steel

we picked through. Nothing was salvaged.

A few days later, a government van,

with a cheeky brown man who roamed with us.

‘This parish is the worse. How many people live so?’

He brought out surveying instruments, we crowded

and he shooed us, repeating, ‘Official business’

until hoarse. He didn’t stay the whole day.

One night my uncle told me the man’s findings.

The whole thing didn’t make sense.

‘I tell you, boy, God forgot us. Sleep now.’

The quiet scene changes with which these poems traverse the seas can sometimes lend a dreamy quality to the memories they express. In “Montale’s Lemons,” Hutchinson describes the vista of his “first snow,” but it isn’t the snow itself, let alone the American Northeast, the reader sees.

My first snow, I open the pages

of Montale, the scent of iron

and light coming out of heads

of lemon trees in the middle

of an orchard where raucous boys

play, not hearing the eel-quiet laureate

who roams under a sky dappled with rust.

Where does Hutchinson go when he’s asleep? In “New World Frescoes,” when the poet opens eyes on America to watch as “Boston turns autumn, an American lethargy / haunts the Prodigal on the piazza.”

Fever creeps

in the evening’s subterfuge, metallic

sheaves of sidewalk leaves dart and frolic

Elsewhere, this same dark hard edge, the perplexing combination of hope and fear in which America specializes, finds expression in the horrors of police brutality. But the sands, again, are constantly shifting. If reading these poems is sometimes a little disorienting, then form has done an adequate job of expressing its content.

For Hutchinson, popular notions of homesickness fail to get at even a quarter of what’s at stake. Still, in places, Hutchinson seems to suggest humor as a balm for the pain of change, difference, and dislocation. In “At Bay,” he pokes a knowing fun at his own “alien” status, tipping a hat to his accent.

When I say ‘coffee’

she thinks Cavafy,

and my head turns to marble.

Sometimes, ‘sea frisk’

means Seferis –

she is that galvanised.

No one has ever said the words “sea frisk” in that order, of course, but to mistake coffee (a major Jamaican export) for the modern Greek poet Cavafy (the author of that famous island poem about a famous wanderer-from-home, “Ithaka”) is so unbelievably idiosyncratic, and yet so believably human, that such a mishearing all but must have happened. Which points to another, frequently effective element at work in Far District: Hutchinson’s poems, patently the stuff of his life, readily flash past the limits of his experience. They’re on surprisingly comfortable speaking terms with that impossible-to-pin-down quality—genuine, unforced universality—not on every page, but often enough to make you stop in your tracks. This is not just another volume of poems about leaving the island for the mainland (or, for that matter, about remembering the island from the mainland). A poem called “Errant,” a high point in the collection, exemplifies this gap-bridging tendency. More Salem than Kingston, it opens with the apparent non sequitur of a haunted house (“a curtain hitched in the window like a tombstone”):

Vine-choked veranda, root-split steps cut off

by a cesspool—alive and dead in it—

cricket balls and our eyes peering at this dark fortress.

This time I am to fetch it, the last leather

ball to fly over the fence like a black butterfly;

and at that age, oblivion matters, so one boy

at a time is sacrificed. The evening too early

to declare ‘bad light’, I push my head between

the barbwire, crossing over, laughter like goats.

Good art is good art. It challenges us, like hardly anything else can, to refine a lifetime of findings. Far District is and does just that. Now making its second round, it’s a book that is not to be missed twice.

Eric Bies is a high school English teacher based in Southern California.