Far District
2010
First Published
4.20
Average Rating
100
Number of Pages
Creating an impressionistic portrait of the poet's boyhood in rural Jamaica, these narrative poems explore the West Indian distrust of European literature and mythology. Written in both traditional and formless verse, as well as in English and Jamaican patois, the book is structured as the spiritual journey of a poet-speaker caught between two worlds: one a benign culture of bush folk and the other a luminous but dangerous sea of myth. The speaker fears the land of myth because he is loyal to the bush people, but he also desires to transcend his physical and intellectual poverty. Little by little, the two cultures come together as the speaker begins grafting childhood memory to the world of imagination, shaped by books, art, music, and travel. At the core of the collection are several elegies to the poet’s grandmother, May, who encouraged his young creativity.
Avg Rating
4.20
Number of Ratings
76
5 STARS
38%
4 STARS
45%
3 STARS
16%
2 STARS
1%
1 STARS
0%
goodreads
Author
Ishion Hutchinson
Author · 4 books
Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of the poetry collections, Far District: Poems (Peepal Tree Press, 2010) and House of Lords and Commons (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016). He teaches in the graduate writing program at Cornell University and is a contributing editor to the literary journals The Common and Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art.
