Department of English Poetry & Poetic series: Ishion Hutchinson

Thursday, February 18, 2021 - 16:00 to 17:00
Online

Poetry & Poetic series: Ishion Hutchinson

A poetry reading and discussion with the multi-award-winning poet, Ishion Hutchinson.

About this Event

Continuing our Poetry and Poetics series into 2021, Maynooth English is delighted to welcome multi-award-winning poet Ishion Hutchinson to read from and discuss new and published work.

Hosted by Dr Karl O'Hanlon and Dr Catherine Gander, this event will take place via Zoom and there will be time for an audience Q&A.

About the poet:

Ishion Hutchinson is the author of two poetry collections, Far District, and House of Lords and Commons, and the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award, a Whiting Writers Award, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, the Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award. He directs the graduate writing program at Cornell University.

About the work:

‘Exquisite’ (New Yorker), ‘breathtaking’ (Los Angeles Times), ‘baroque and moon-lit’ (Boston Globe) – House of Lords and Commons won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and was widely applauded in ‘books of the year’. It was published in the UK and Ireland by Faber in 2018.

House of Lords and Commons is a profound engagement with culture and landscape, seascape and language, inheritance and race. It speaks – as its title implies – to a pursuit of justice and rebalance of a world in which lords and commoners must live side by side, and where the distance between those who ‘have’ and those who ‘have not’ is a more breaching and surprising journey than we perhaps once thought.

The poems convey the complex allure of Hutchinson’s native Jamaican landscape, and the violent forces that shaped its history, with remarkable lyric precision. But they speak far beyond Caribbean experience, thanks to the author’s uncanny ability to reach the universal within the local.

House of Lords and Commons is a skilfully crafted and tender expression of human experience in a world of prejudice and danger that is also a world of intense colour, remarkable music, indefatigable love.

‘Ishion Hutchinson’s darkly tinged yet exuberant new poems are the strongest to come out of the Caribbean in a generation.’ William Logan, New York Times Book Review

To purchase House of Lords and Commons (Faber), please click here.

To read poetry by Ishion Hutchinson, please click here.

Click here to register on Eventbrite.

Registered attendees will receive the link to the event an hour before it begins.