6 months ago
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Three pre-eminent Jamaican poets are lauding fellow poet Ishion Hutchinson for being shortlisted for Canada’s prestigious International Griffin Poetry Prize. One of the world’s most generous poetry awards, the prize, this year, is worth CDN$130,000, making it the world’s largest international prize for a single book written in, or translated into, English.
The shortlist was announced on April 17, and the winner will be announced on June 5. Hutchinson’s latest book of poetry, School of Instructions, has put him in line for the prize.
Born in Port Antonio, he has already gained much international recognition. For the poetry collection, Far District, he won the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, and for House of Lords and Commons, he received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Additionally, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize in Literature, the Whiting Award, and the Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry, among other honours.
Responding to requests from The Sunday Gleaner, Jamaican poets Olive Senior, the current poet laureate of Jamaica; Kwame Dawes, the poet slated to succeed her and Mervyn Morris, the immediate past-holder of the office, have reacted with elation to the news.
“I’m delighted,” said Morris, in a quick response at the National Library of Jamaica before speaking at the launch of his latest poetry collection, Last Reel.
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“Ision’s shortlisting for another of the world’s great poetry prizes affirms his place among the best of the new generation of Jamaican and Caribbean poets,” said Senior, adding that Jamaican poets have been doing well overseas. “He was also shortlisted for the Eliot Prize in the UK (won by another Jamaican Jason Allen-Paisant who also won the Forward Prize Best Collection 2024 and is a contender for the international Jhalak Prize). The Griffin Prize will be announced in Toronto, a city where the poet laureate is another Jamaican, Lillian Allen. Jamaicans at home should take note: Our writers are striking gold out there.”
Dawes has glowing words for Hutchinson. “The Griffin shortlisting is just another of the many awards that Ishion Hutchinson will garner over the course of his career. The authority he demonstrates now in his mastery of poetic form and his [lyrical] grace is astounding. He is, simply put, a poet of world stature, whose growing body of work is making him one of the handful of poets [who] we will regard as the major literary voices of the 21st century.”
The judges’ citation for Hutchinson reads: “Primordial elementals are here: we are by the sea, in the desert, in the trenches, in the mind of a schoolchild discovering ‘natural’ history, in vibrant daily life, in anabasis of war, and studying the innocent volunteers going to disease and slaughter. School of Instructions is a transcendent hybridic feast of a book, an innovative condensed epic comprising startling poetry, primary sources, Biblical naming and mapping, and a haunting trajectory of the British Empire’s Middle Eastern campaigns of WWI juxtaposed with 20th century Jamaica. Hutchinson’s brilliant transmission is deeply intuitive and profound as scholarly and poetic gnosis, you feel instructed by the ongoing koan, coil, knot of colonialism ingrained with civilization.”
In email correspondence, Hutchinson wrote that his research for School of Instructions, which was commissioned by the British poet Karen McCarthy for the Imperial War Museum in preparation for the 100th anniversary of the end of World War 1 and was to examine the participation of Caribbean soldiers in the war, opened up “a new world”.
He explained, “The emphasis is on new. Before my visit to the Imperial Museum, I was only vaguely familiar with the history of the West Indies’ participation in the First World War. In the archive that history became alive to me in a sporadic, non-linear way due to my non-systematic approach to the material. The material, I felt, concealed a kind of natural poetry which, like a child or an Old Testament redactor, I assembled into many patterns. Out of this assembly or play, I developed an intimate lyric mode, my own language which counterpoints, clashes with, the archival material floating through the collection.”
Hutchinson spent a lot of time as a child in Port Antonio, reading encyclopedias and I asked his thoughts on the sort of poets present-day Jamaican children, who daily spend hours on their cellphones, might become.
He replied, “Well, let’s hope young children in Jamaica, and elsewhere, are reading poems – or encyclopedias – on their phones! It’s true that as a child I spent a lot of time reading encyclopedias, but I also spent a lot of time doing other things, and I’m sure Jamaican children are doing other things besides spending time on their phones. I think it is inevitable that a handful of strong poets will come out of the younger generation. Though whether those future poets will be recognised by their own is another question.”
Hutchinson also said that he continued to receive poetic inspiration from his frequent trips back home to Jamaica.
The Griffin Trust was founded in April 2000 by Chairman Scott Griffin, along with trustees Margaret Atwood, Robert Hass, Michael Ondaatje, Robin Robertson and David Young.
English (US) ·