Far district Poems

Hutchinson's debut, Far District, is appearing for the first time in the U.S, 14 years late and after his third collection, School of Instructions (2023). But poetry of this quality is never belated and ever auspicious. If the first poem in any collection is under pressure, the first poem in a first collection is under more. About a boy's confrontation with a carcass on the way to school, "The Turning Road" also manages to be about the road not taken and a painting by André Derain. Everything is alive to Hutchinson. He compares and contrasts what he finds at home in Jamaica with the colonial sense of an island without history. Not only the title of the collection and of the collection's piercing long poem about Hutchinson's home ground around Port Antonio, "Far District," is in the syncretic tradition of writers Hutchinson addresses--Georg Trakl, Eugenio Montale, Claude McKay, Christopher Smart, Henry Vaughan and Peter Tosh. Hutchinson is doing what every major poet does, remaking the tradition in his own image.