Fugitive Tilts
Essays
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Ishion Hutchinson turns his poetic sensibility to questions of home, displacement, and memory in his beautiful and searingly brilliant prose debut.
In Fugitive Tilts, the poet Ishion Hutchinson turns to prose to create an incomplete biography of love: love of poetry, discovered in childhood; love of home, with its continual disconnections and returns; and love of the works and artists—from Treasure Island, to John Coltrane, to the Jamaican music of his youth—that look over him with an angel’s aura.
Drawing inspiration from Derek Walcott’s notion that “the sea is history,” Fugitive Tilts is suffused with the sea, present whether Hutchinson is recalling a trip to Senegal or memorializing his grandmother in a meditation on a painting by Édouard Vuillard. With this fresh, archipelagic sensibility Hutchinson confronts the fraught questions of inheritances and influences, “acknowledging,” in his words, “something outside our view.” These essays, varied in their forms and ranging across time and place, allow Hutchinson to build a space from which the suffering of the past and the present can be reckoned with and survived.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
