Rapture's Road

The second poetry collection from the author of All Down Darkness Wide and one of the Sunday Times '30 under 30' in Ireland'An exquisitely calm and insightful lyric poet'MAX PORTER, author of Shy'His work will continue to be treasured long after our lifetimes'DOIREANN NÍ GHRÍOFA, author of A Ghost in the ThroatIn this remarkable second collection, Seán Hewitt describes a journey haunted by love, loss and estrangement. 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.