It was intended to look into the participation of Caribbean soldiers in that war. A practical, direct commission. I'd thought that once I'd gone to the archives, I'd find a document, see what interested me about it and write a poem. But something happened a whole new world opened up which has, over subsequent years, become School of Instructions.
The book is extraordinarily powerful, partly because of the way you collapse time: a schoolboy growing up in Jamaica in the 1990s merges with the first world war narrative how did you hit upon the form? Through my love of modernist poets: TS Eliot, of course.
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