US-based Jamaican poet Ishion Hutchinson’s third collection, School of Instructions (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), began as a commission investigating the experiences of West Indian soldiers during the First World War. The book developed this research into a wide-ranging meditation that encompasses boyhood, martial rule, civil unrest, and coming of age in perilous eras. Hutchinson’s methodological approach to creating and shaping a poem is on display here, with his usual fine-tuned microcosmic techniques of drawing meaning from even the tiniest of everyday details.