Headline December 04, 2016/ ''' *THE HOUSE OF LORDS* '''

''' *THE HOUSE OF LORDS* '''

UNCORKING A FAVORITE VINTAGE, and infusing it, and  reminding the world  that -just a handful of-

Pakistani students, pulled their country back  -from a horrid precipice. And right on to the  *Center-Stage* of the world. 

And these great Pakistani students did that,  with an unflinching and growing support from the Great Students of America, and the students from all the countries of the world.

The truth is that the world has long relied on the United States to be the steady hand in the Indo-Pakistan region and flaring conflicts.

So, just after the publication of  !WOW!'s Headline : *The Year of Mercy* President Trump graciously called and lifted Pakistan's spirit. and dismantled many rising risks.

And much of that call infusion,   to the initiated,   came from the great environment the students built on !WOW!  -the World Students Society.

*THE STREET LIGHTS shed pearl that night,

stray dogs ran but did not bark at the

strange

shadows; the *Minister of All* could not

sleep,

mosquitoes swarmed around his net,

his portrait and his pitcher and

drinking glass;

the flags stiffened on the embassy

building but

did not fall when the machine guns

flared*.

ISHION HUTCHINSON'S DARKLY tinged yet exuberant new poems are the strongest to come out of the Caribbean in a generation.

Haunted by his country's fractured past, by memories of an upbringing starved of books, he escaped from history through literature. If his heart still lies in Jamaica, writers have given him a landscape beyond memory.

His touchstone is the magnificent passage in Xenophon where the Greek mercenaries, having bought their way across the Persian Empire, come to the Black Sea, shouting ''Thalatta! Thalatta!''  [''The sea! The sea!'' ]

The moment would any poet trying to find his way home.

If this resembles  Derek Walcott's poetry, the heavy influence is lightly worn. The saturated descriptions of island flora, the pen portraits [as they were once called] of local characters, the stranger-in-a-strange land displacement-

The visceral love of Europe and the classics  -all this make  ''House of Lords and Commons''  indebted to the poet who for half a century has cast a long shadow over Caribbean literature.

Soaked in the intelligence of cities and towns where nature seems the dominating grace, these poems try to negotiate a treaty between Jamaica and the foreign world for which the poet abandoned it.

In memories of the near  riot of sugar cane cutters stiffed of their salaries or the mysterious classroom hierarchies of primary school in St. Thomas Parish, the country Hutchinson left behind has rarely been so vividly rendered.

After college in Jamaica, the poet flew to America. He now teaches at Cornell.

His descriptions find their urgency in his unsettled place between two worlds. The fraught self-examination of these poems defines their achievement. 

Where Walcott's point of view was established in his 30s and rarely wavered, Hutchinson seems still in the midst of inventing himself. His rooted suspicion of academic views of empire is no more savagely expressed than during a lecture by a '' tweeded rodent scholar'' :

a bore

was harping in dead metaphor 

the horror of colonial heritage.

I sank in the dark, I hemorrhaged.

There I remember the peninsula

of my sea, the breeze opening the water

to no book but dusk; no electricity,

just stars pulsing over shanties.

The poet may perhaps be forgiven the touch of sentiment at the end. {Night sky makes him mawkish}.

The whole of  *House of Lords and commons''    -the title of term for the house of Parliament  -is a rejection of unctuous jargon of academia, its gaseous cliches about the postcolonial Other- and the anthropological gaze 

Hutchinson writes poetry with an estrangement that doesn't need the justifications of theory or its distaste of drenched metaphors that escape the political realm.

With most respectful dedication to the Students, Professors and Teachers of America,  and all the countries of the world. See Ya all on !WOW!   -the World Students Society and Twitter-!E-WOW!   -the Ecosystem 2011:

''' Poetry & Politics '''

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless