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.”
