Fugitive Tilts

In Fugitive Tilts, Ishion Hutchinson, author of House of Lords and Commons (forwhich he won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry), turns to prose tocreate an incomplete biography of love: love of poetry, discovered in childhood; loveof home, with its continual disconnections and returns; and love of the works andartists that look over him with ‘an angel’s aura’, from Treasure Island to John Coltrane.Gathering essays that range across time, place, and form, Hutchinson builds,piece by piece, a space from which the suffering of the past and the present canbe reckoned with and survived. Through these texts, he pays homage to theinheritances and influences that are part of his history and to Derek Walcott inparticular, whose legacy threads through the book. Above all, Fugitive Tilts is abook suffused with the sea: its sound, its geography, and, as Hutchinson writes,its ‘memory in motion