Rapture's Road :From the author of All Down Darkness Wide
Rapture's Road :From the author of All Down Darkness Wide
paperback
Published:
11 January, 2024
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Description
*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE *
In this remarkable second collection, Seán Hewitt describes a journey haunted by love, loss and estrangement - from one of the Sunday Times 30 under 30 in Ireland
'Points to a bright future for Irish poetry' SUNDAY TIMES
'An exquisitely calm and insightful lyric poet' MAX PORTER
'Amazing writing of breathtaking power' IRVINE WELSH
As the mind wanders and becomes spectral, these poems forge their own unique path through the landscape. The road Hewitt takes us on is a sleepwalk into the nightwoods, a dream-state where nature is by turns regenerated and broken, and where the split self of the speaker is interrupted by a series of ghosts, memories and encounters.
Following the reciprocal relationship between queer sexuality and the natural world that he explored in Tongues of Fire, the poet conjures us here into a trance: a deep delirium of hypnotic, hectic rapture where everything is called into question, until a union is finally achieved – a union in nature, with nature.
A threnody for what is lost, a dance of apocalypse and rebirth, Rapture’s Road draws us through what is hidden, secret, often forbidden, to a state of ecstasy. It leads into the humid night, through lethal love and grief, and glimpses, at the end of the journey, a place of tenderness and reawakening.
More Details
| Type | Book |
|---|---|
| ISBN13 | 9781787334274 |
| ISBN10 | 1787334279 |
| Number Of Pages | 80 |
| Item Weight | 98 g |
| Product Dimensions | 129 x 197 x 9 mm |
| Publisher / Reseller | Vintage Publishing |
| Format | paperback |
Media Reviews
A poet unafraid of the simply gorgeous… The undaunted vitality of these poems points to a bright future for Irish poetry * Sunday Times *
Stunning... Shot through with yearning and sacred imagery... Hewitt's poetry is a hide and seek of the self. It reveals and conceals * Observer *
Rapture’s Road is amazing writing of breathtaking power. One of those poetry collections where, in the internet/AI era, you feel the bone-crunching, heart-scorching humanity in almost every sentence -- Irvine Welsh * Guardian *
Hewitt’s words indubitably penetrate, with Nerudian passion and force * Guardian *
An exquisitely calm and insightful lyric poet, reverential in nature and gorgeously wise in the field of human drama -- Max Porter, author of Shy
Rapture's Road is that rare thing when it comes to second collections. Something which takes his debut Tongues of Fire’s natural elements and post-modern Romantic themes and fashions them into something wholly unique. Rapture’s Road is political without being hectoring, mystical without being detached, and wholly in hoc to a natural world in all its chaos, beauty, creativity and destruction * RTÉ *
GoodReads Reviews
Author's Bio
Seán Hewitt was born in 1990. He is the author of two poetry collections, Tongues of Fire and Rapture’s Road, and a memoir, All Down Darkness Wide. He collaborated with the artist Luke Edward Hall on 300,000 Kisses: Tales of Queer Love from the Ancient World. Hewitt has received the Laurel Prize and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and been shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. He lectures at Trinity College Dublin and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.