Fugitive tilts Essays

Jamaican poet Hutchinson's first book of prose is a miscellany containing a myriad. "Rough Water: A Senegal Diary," the last and longest piece, is travel writing in space-time. Hutchinson stands looking through the "Door of No Return" in the slave fort on Île de Gorée, a brink that cannot be stepped back from, and observes a container ship filling the sea view through the doorless doorway in a moment of uncontained irony. The first sentence in "The Bearings of the Island" reads, "A defense of poetry is a contradiction in terms." Same goes for vision, which is so much more penetrating, revealing, and unifying than sight in Hutchinson's extrasensory sense. Praise brings out Hutchinson's finest. Pieces about photographer Akinbode Akinbiyi, artists Donald Rodney and Nari Ward, and poets Les Murray, George Seferis, and Claude McKay instance ecstatic ekphrasis. The essay about his move to Kingston for college harrows, while the essay on Frederick Douglass flames. Alchemically combining the words of Douglass and poet Robert Hayden, Hutchinson hears "the secret ministry of poetics suddenly affirming the sacred ministry of life."

In this erudite collection, Hutchinson (School of Instructions), a NBCC Award--winning poet, ruminates on colonialism, diasporic identity, and home. The sea serves as a recurring motif in essays that encompass Hutchinson's fond recollections of reading Treasure Island as a child on his grandmother's veranda overlooking the Caribbean Sea in Jamaica, as well as considerations of how artists have grappled with the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade. For instance, he describes how British artist Donald Rodney sketched drops of blood while plagued with visions of slave ships during a hospital stint for the sickle-cell anemia that would kill him in 1998. The tension between the ocean's splendor and its role in this brutal history permeates the volume, as when Hutchinson recounts breaking down in tears while eating a meal from a street vendor during a trip to Senegal that he undertook to better understand his heritage: "Sentimental or romantic, there's a faith I'm unwilling to concede that in eating a fish from the same terrible sea my ancestors endured or perished in, I was in spirit with them." Hutchinson elegantly probes the painful history of Atlantic slavery with a potent combination of intimate personal reflections and sophisticated artistic exegesis. It's a worthy complement to Dionne Brand's Salvage. Photos. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency. (Apr.)