Lantern
Pages: 36
|Published: 7 Feb 2019
Description
Wild and deep as the forests they explore, Sean Hewitt's poems go to the woods to understand, to follow the searching root of snowberry, hazels, thistles, bracken to the source. The trees hum with information, with messages and myths to be read and the willow with its head laid down /on the water is whispering something and a poet can stand in the winter woods and ask to know What is the sound of winter. . . and where does it go?
Here there is to the wych-elm and to the darkness, and to the secret language of oak. These are queer spaces, these consecrated places of communion and sex, secluded and dripping with rain, of the men who meet each other outside in the dark chamber of the wood , who find their urgent way through the undergrowth like deer plummeting through the wet branches. As well as love, Lantern deals in loss, opening with the assertion that woods are forms of grief / grown from the earth. This is a jewel-bright and quietly euphoric debut, as thrilling in its physicality as it is dextrous in its imagination, and, despite the thorns of love and pain, unafraid to dive into the wilderness.
Here there is to the wych-elm and to the darkness, and to the secret language of oak. These are queer spaces, these consecrated places of communion and sex, secluded and dripping with rain, of the men who meet each other outside in the dark chamber of the wood , who find their urgent way through the undergrowth like deer plummeting through the wet branches. As well as love, Lantern deals in loss, opening with the assertion that woods are forms of grief / grown from the earth. This is a jewel-bright and quietly euphoric debut, as thrilling in its physicality as it is dextrous in its imagination, and, despite the thorns of love and pain, unafraid to dive into the wilderness.
