Shakespeare And Company

School of Instructions, the latest work by Ishion Hutchinson, draws from the time he spent in the archive of the Imperial War Museum, to foreground the experience—brutal, significant, but long overlooked—of West Indian volunteers in the First World War. This book length poem is a sensorial voyage into the convoys, garrisons and trenches of the Middle Eastern war theatre in all its monstrousness and disorientation, in which Ishion Hutchinson masterfully deploys his immense gift for spiriting vivid, textured, and living images from the page. The poem also juxtaposes the horror of war with the life of Godspeed, an ordinary—by which I mean mischievous and sweet-natured—boy growing up in rural Jamaica in the 1990s. And it is perhaps this interweaving of narratives, of epochs, of worlds, of the micro and the macro, that makes School of Instructions not just a significant work of poetry, but also an important act of historical empathy, reaching back more than a century to highlight how the ossified remains of empire