Far District, the transporting debut from the author of House of Lords and Commons, is structured as the spiritual journey of a poet-speaker caught between two cultures. As childhood memory is grafted to the world of imagination – shaped by books, art, music and travel – the two come together to develop a new vision of what ‘home’ might offer. ‘Far District is a classic, which is to say a rare and exemplary first book. This book is striking for the way Ishion Hutchinson’s gorgeously textured language – shanty-zinc, asthmatic whirl, poincianas – stretches over far-reaching narratives of landscape and culture.
