Hutchinson is a poet of ambivalent homage; his brash, brilliant verse is both wrought and rooted in contradiction. Photograph by Pari Dukovic

The Jamaican-born poet Ishion Hutchinson’s second book, “House of Lords and Commons,” is a study of place and memory rendered in what used to be called “the grand style”: the timeless, high-literary idiom that nearly anyone who has ever learned the language would identify as “poetry,” based on its sound alone, and that nonplussed readers of contemporary poetry sometimes say they miss. Of course, the irony is that timelessness itself can seem dated; modernism emerged in part to change the acoustics within which lines of poetry were heard. Our ears changed, and fewer and fewer poets of note wanted to make those old sounds. There are analogues in nearly every art: modes and vocabularies that we accept in the work of the past but which seem, in new work, like period reënactment or, if the seams are exposed, like postmodern bricolage. Here’s what Hutchinson’s version of timelessness, handed down, to some extent, from the great Caribbean poet Derek Walcott, sounds like:

Noon ictus cooling the veranda’s fretwork, the child sits after his harp boning burlesque in the bower, his slit of gulls’ nerves silenced into hydrangea. Violet and roan, the bridal sun is opening and closing a window, filling a clay pot of coins with coins; candle jars, a crystal globe, cut milk boxes with horn petals snapping their iceberg-Golgotha crackle.

Hutchinson’s lines listen to themselves, finding the next phrase, and then the next, implicit in what’s already been written down. His sound effects are exquisite: the clusters of consonants (hard “c”s, then “b”s and “p”s) and the vowels so open you could fall into them, the magisterial cresting syntax, the brilliant coupling of unlike words (“iceberg-Golgotha”). Occasionally, a severe misstep (“boning burlesque in the bower”) undermines, by its clumsiness, the classicism that surrounds it. For better or worse, lines like these, from “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun,” act as though they’d never heard of prose, the flat-footed bureaucrat trying to tame their airborne acrobatics.Hutchinson, who is thirty-three and teaches at Cornell, might be called a post-post-colonial writer: his art, suspicious of top-down institutions—including academia—finds in the impasto treatment of sensory minutiae a protest against abstract authority. These poems might be shimmed into a syllabus or buried in a casketlike journal article, if they weren’t so punk-baroque and brat-belletristic. Professional literary discourse often allegorizes human passion and conflict, in ways that make the actual human secondary. But poets don’t want to be fodder for panels and colloquia, and Hutchinson’s poems are oppositional and disruptive, sometimes tauntingly so. “The Orator,” like Walt Whitman’s “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” is a poem about poetry itself, its immediate purchase on the sublime, so much more powerful than classroom circumlocution. A lecture on “Caribbean Culture” is delivered by a “bore” who “was harping in dead metaphor / the horror of colonial heritage.” Suddenly, a thunderstorm knocks out the lights, and the lecturer now stands helpless in the dark:

. . . in the surprised blackness, his soul exposed, the façade recessed, I saw the face that curried Pelops in the Antilles to straddle the ivory laps of liberal, money-giving chaps with an itch for the unscripted Folk and Oral Tradition, a hot spoke in his spinning radius unveiling the veil of the shroud of the curtain, and with spectroscopic effect, he has dazzled all and proven to be ebony solid.

In place of the orator’s “dead metaphor,” Hutchinson offers a handful of live ones: this “tweeded rodent scholar” is a meretricious pedant who “curried Pelops / in the Antilles to straddle the ivory laps” like an exotic dancer at a trustees’ meeting, as well as a kind of Messiah-Wizard of Oz, “unveiling / the veil of the shroud of the curtain,” and a sham Vegas magician dazzling the crowd with “spectroscopic effect.” The poem baits us into comparing Hutchinson’s own performance against this “wine-for-rum, / lectern-for-veranda, brilliant scum,” who’s brought low when the technology falters.

But the orator is a pretty easy target, and Hutchinson’s vitriol (“scum,” “rodent”) is comically excessive, his rhymes approaching drawing-roomdoggerel (“laps” and “chaps,” for instance). Not everything here is meant to be apt, classic, or anthology-ready. The poem is marginal doodling of a very high order, Miltonic graffiti that asserts its power by being at once polished and rash. The orator is a sycophant, a parasite; at the other end of the spectrum is the speaker of these brilliant lines from “The Ark by ‘Scratch,’ ” a reggae Noah—probably Lee (Scratch) Perry, the Jamaican performer—implored by a “genie” to “build a studio” from cultural salvage and scrap:

The genie says build a studio. I build a studio from ash. I make it out of peril and slum things. I alone when blood and bullet and all Christ-fucking-’Merican-dollar politicians talk the pressure down to nothing, when the equator’s confused and coke bubbles on tinfoil to cemented wreath.

The poem describes its own construction, as one remarkable detail after another is loaded into the “studio” to be preserved for postdiluvian use. The speaker is Noah plus “Scratch” plus Hutchinson—which somehow, by the end, adds up to Whitman, whose broad-chested boasts prefigure Hutchinson’s: “I Upsetter, I Django / on the black wax, the Super Ape, E.T., I cleared the wave.”