Seán Hewitt made his name with an arresting debut collection, Tongues of Fire, and an unforgettable memoir, All Down Darkness Wide, an account of his life as a young gay man and a moving exploration of his relationship with a depressed partner, a book that doubled as a homage to Gerard Manley Hopkins. In the memoir, he described himself, at one point, as a ghost looking on to his own life. Rapture’s Road, his stunning second poetry selection, is a continuation of that haunting and Hopkins’s influence is again present, though the poems are also suggestive of Thomas Hardy in their robust yearning and dependence on landscape.
Hewitt’s poetry is a hide and seek of the self. It reveals and conceals. In some of his best poems, nature offers the means of disguise, raided like a dressing-up box. In an untitled poem, he writes about the night: “And I, androgyne of the garden, raise my arms for the gown night holds above me, let fall over my cool skin and slink from the field through the brush, at dusk.” In another untitled poem, he pictures how it might be to “step naked inside/the original night blue dress/its torso of silk…” In Immram, he remembers bathing in silver waters: “Even my skin/sang in its cold dress.”
The sensual camouflage comes across as more necessary than frivolous and in parallel with the poetry’s homoeroticism. You read Hewitt as if his words themselves might prove forbidden fruit, sensing his hyper-vigilance about what they might get wrong, what they know, what they have to give away. The opening poem, A Ministry, begins: “Why did you bring me here/ again, feet.”
The playful decision not to abscond directly into the lyrical is nicely judged. And then, natural lyric poet that Hewitt is, he goes on, with pleasing accuracy, to liken the night sky in winter to “the inside of a mussel shell” and introduces the idea of playing at a double self, “sinner and priest”. It would seem from these poems that, in a sense, coming out is something that never ceases to happen: different ways of emerging, blossoming, asserting sexuality. The untitled second section, a poem crowded with larks, violets and holm oaks, could easily have gone awry in leading to a car park where men meet for sex (queering the pitch in the wrong sense) but Hewitt knows how to navigate:
…Go to the car park by the pitch
with the headlights waiting, with the engines
killed and the windscreens all fogged over
Stand in the purgatory of the trees
to watch the man passing the windows
like an angel, bowing to them
He grew up in a Catholic family – and the poems are charged with sacred imagery. They are also driven by a phantom wildness – often, strikingly – including moths (the nearest thing nature offers to ghosts). Hewitt’s lepidopterist lyricism includes a wonderfully precise description of the merveille du jour in “art-deco mint-green herringbone” – a passing dandy of the night.
There are good, spare poems about his mother and father. His fault is that he occasionally tilts into the cloying – sentiment a sigh away from sentimentality. In Little Flower (a reference, presumably, to Saint Thérèse of Lisieux) the diminutive is only one of the culprits. There is a marvellous sense of release from a tension that dominates these poems whenever he is able give himself the slip. The momentum of Dispersion Song (the second poem with that title) is elating, the catching of a moment that feels eternal in which rapture is sent off road, into the long grass and the last of the sunshine.
• Rapture’s Road by Seán Hewitt is published by Jonathan Cape (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
Dispersion Song by Seán Hewitt
So I turn off the road into the long grass,
the seed-heads whipping my calves
as I run, my ankles giving way, stumbling,
and the sun is sinking and there are rooks
settling again in the holm oaks, and I feel
somehow like the first man, not the last,
running not towards or away from anything
but through it, outside of thought, the stalks
of bedstraw and the moths lifting, fluttering
then overtaking me and falling again
into the golden grass, and the sun shooting now
through the branches as though the woods
are to be newly broken, the earth split apart,
and finally, I think – if only my body
could hold me – I think I would never stop –
