Rapture's Road: from the author of All Down Darkness Wide

(Paperback)

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In this remarkable second collection, Sean Hewitt describes a journey haunted by love, loss and estrangement - from one of the Sunday Times 30 under 30 in Ireland In this remarkable second collection, Sean Hewitt describes a journey haunted by love, loss and estrangement - from one of the Sunday Times 30 under 30 in Ireland 'An exquisitely calm and insightful lyric poet' MAX PORTER, author of Shy 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.

Reviews

An exquisitely calm and insightful lyric poet, reverential in nature and gorgeously wise in the field of human drama -- Max Porter, author of Shy
A writer whose work will continue to be treasured long after our lifetimes. A wonder. -- Doireann N Ghrofa, praise for ALL DOWN DARKNESS WIDE
An extraordinary collection - heart-bruising, tender - one to cherish, and live by... beyond-gorgeous, beyond-glorious, blood-felt, feral, luminous -- Fiona Benson, praise for TONGUES OF FIRE
Gorgeous and moving prose that excavates the deep complexities of grief, shame and love with a tenderness and lightness of touch that makes the words sing -- Andrew McMillan, praise for ALL DOWN DARKNESS WIDE
I fell in love with these wild, heartsore, ecstatic poems... A beautiful book and Sen Hewitt is an extraordinary writer -- Liz Berry, praise for TONGUES OF FIRE
The best new work of non-fiction I've read in years -- Sarah Perry, praise for ALL DOWN DARKNESS WIDE
Intensely original... Some of the most beautiful prose I've read in years -- Alexander Chee, praise for ALL DOWN DARKNESS WIDE

Author Bio

Sean Hewitt was born in 1990. He is the author of the poetry collection Tongues of Fire, which received the Laurel Prize and was shortlisted for many awards, including the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. His memoir, All Down Darkness Wide, was shortlisted for Biography of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards and for the Foyles Non-Fiction Book of the Year, and longlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize and the Polari Book Prize. Hewitt lectures at Trinity College Dublin, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2022, he was awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.