The November Poetry Book Group will be meeting via Zoom
Monday, November 17th • 6:30 PM ET / 11:30 PM IST via Zoom
Session open to all: no registration required.
Click on this link to join the Zoom session
Find out about Solas Nua's Poetry Book Group and titles list
Join the Book Group's Facebook Group here!
*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.
About the Author
Seán Hewitt’s debut collection of poetry, Tongues of Fire, won the Laurel Prize in 2021, and was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize, and a Dalkey Literary Award. In 2020, he was chosen by The Sunday Times as one of their “30 under 30” artists in Ireland. His memoir, All Down Darkness Wide, is published by Jonathan Cape in the U.K. and Penguin Press in the United States (2022). It was shortlisted for Biography of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards, for the Foyles Book of the Year in nonfiction, for the RSL Ondaatje Prize, and for a LAMBDA award, and won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2022. Seán is Assistant Professor in Literary Practice at Trinity College Dublin, and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
All events are listed in Eastern Time and Irish Standard Time.
