Rapture’s Road by Seán Hewitt (Jonathan Cape, £12.99)
“He likes it, he likes me / when I break. It gives him something / to assemble” admits the opening poem Ministry, in which two lakeside lovers tessellate themselves into the “bone-hard and lucent” landscape, as if their lovemaking were its own biome: “When I break, / I break, predictably, into song”. Hewitt’s speakers are music-mad: his world is replete with “air-quiet lullabies”, “the high black notes of starling flocks”, and “the soundproofed room of heaven”, a masterfully compressed abstraction that would seem to problematise the rich history of gay lyricism in Judeo-Christian systems of belief. But Hewitt’s words indubitably penetrate, with Nerudian passion and force: “I made for him a word / Adam could not have said inside the garden”. At the core of these unflinchingly sonorous lyrics are prose poems of tethering and untethering to a lover: “I needed to live whole within my longing, punished you for your kind, unknowing love.”
