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Rapture's Road
Raptures Road ABISBOOK Jonathan Cape.
69 pages, Paperback
Published January 11, 2024
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396 people want to read
About the author
Seán Hewitt
23 books370 followersSeán Hewitt's debut collection of poetry, Tongues of Fire (2020), won the Laurel Prize in 2021. His memoir, All Down Darkness Wide (2022), won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2022. He lives in Dublin.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 30 reviews
June 13, 2024
What is it about the Irish and their way with words? Spine tinglingly beautiful.
Such an eye, such a voice this man has got. One of Nature’s finest and so he writes of love and more. A must re-read.
Such an eye, such a voice this man has got. One of Nature’s finest and so he writes of love and more. A must re-read.
March 18, 2024
(3.5) The points of reference are so similar to his 2020 debut collection, Tongues of Fire, that parts of what I wrote about that one are fully applicable here: “Sex and grief, two major themes, are silhouetted against the backdrop of nature. Fields and forests are loci of meditation and epiphany, but also of clandestine encounters between men.” Perhaps inevitably, then, this felt less fresh, but there was still much to enjoy. I particularly loved two poems about moths (the merveille du jour as an “art-deco mint-green herringbone. Soft furred little absinthe warrior”), “To Autumn,” and “Alcyone,” which likens a kingfisher to “a rip / in the year’s old fabric”.
In “Two Apparitions,” the poet’s late father seems visible again. Many of the scenes take place at dusk or dark. There’s a layer of menace to “Night-Scented Stock,” about an abusive relationship, and the account of a slaughter in “Pig.” But the stand-out is “We Didn’t Mean to Kill Mr Flynn,” based on the 1982 murder of a gay man in a Dublin park. Hewitt drew lines from court proceedings and periodicals in the Irish Queer Archive at the National Library of Ireland, where he was poet in residence. He voices first the gang of killers, then Flynn himself. The trial kickstarted Ireland’s Pride movement.
More favourite lines:
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
In “Two Apparitions,” the poet’s late father seems visible again. Many of the scenes take place at dusk or dark. There’s a layer of menace to “Night-Scented Stock,” about an abusive relationship, and the account of a slaughter in “Pig.” But the stand-out is “We Didn’t Mean to Kill Mr Flynn,” based on the 1982 murder of a gay man in a Dublin park. Hewitt drew lines from court proceedings and periodicals in the Irish Queer Archive at the National Library of Ireland, where he was poet in residence. He voices first the gang of killers, then Flynn himself. The trial kickstarted Ireland’s Pride movement.
More favourite lines:
Come out, make a verb of me, let
my body do your speaking tonight —
(from “A Strain of the Earth’s Sweet Being”)
awestruck, bright,
a child in the bell-tower of beauty —
(from “Skylarks”)
Love, the world is failing:
come and fail with me.
(from “Nightfall”)
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
January 1, 2024
Starting 2024 strong with another stunning collection of poetry from Seán Hewitt. Can't recommend this enough!
January 14, 2024
The poetic equivalent to going cruising in the woods and experiencing a spiritual communion with nature. Another stunning collection from one of my favourite poets.
September 10, 2024
This is fine modern poetry. Hewitt fruitfully reimagines the Romantic tradition of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats, crafting beautiful ballads about grief, sexuality, individualism, and our increasingly estranged relationship to the natural world.
‘The owl in the woods has a hollowed cry and the moth has a furry flutter - but you, my love, and me alone have the tender touch of another.
Unspirited now, untenanted waste, the meadow all locked in its end; all hours are after, all pasts are done, and the future too heavy to bend.
The hedgehog is haunted by dreams of the fox and the fox by the bands of men - but come, my love, with me, alone to inhabit those years again.
Come down, come down, between the yews to the glade where the last flowers bloom; for all colour is gone, all wonder is lost to the coal and the petrol fume.’
‘The owl in the woods has a hollowed cry and the moth has a furry flutter - but you, my love, and me alone have the tender touch of another.
Unspirited now, untenanted waste, the meadow all locked in its end; all hours are after, all pasts are done, and the future too heavy to bend.
The hedgehog is haunted by dreams of the fox and the fox by the bands of men - but come, my love, with me, alone to inhabit those years again.
Come down, come down, between the yews to the glade where the last flowers bloom; for all colour is gone, all wonder is lost to the coal and the petrol fume.’
January 10, 2024
“i could not leave my sleep without him. his was the dream i saw life through.”
fuck
fuck
February 12, 2024
It’s really good!
A few years ago I read Hewitt’s debut collection, Tongues of Fire, when I was just starting to read poetry for pleasure.
A couple of years ago he made me cry three consecutive mornings on the train to London Bridge when reading his memoir, All Down Darkness Wide.
A huge amount has changed since I read that first book and I was very excited for this latest work to be released.
Nature and the natural world is alive on every page. Dreamlike wanders through meadows, woods and gardens. Insects, birds and livestock populate the poems.
Also sensual, heartbreaking, sexy, and hopeful.
Delighted to have read in front of the fire on a stormy evening. Will read again very soon.
A few years ago I read Hewitt’s debut collection, Tongues of Fire, when I was just starting to read poetry for pleasure.
A couple of years ago he made me cry three consecutive mornings on the train to London Bridge when reading his memoir, All Down Darkness Wide.
A huge amount has changed since I read that first book and I was very excited for this latest work to be released.
Nature and the natural world is alive on every page. Dreamlike wanders through meadows, woods and gardens. Insects, birds and livestock populate the poems.
Also sensual, heartbreaking, sexy, and hopeful.
Delighted to have read in front of the fire on a stormy evening. Will read again very soon.
January 10, 2025
“This sun is an echo stored in the soundproofed room of heaven.” My adoration for Seán Hewitt and his work verges on the embarrassing, so it’s an immense privilege to receive a proof of his upcoming second poetry collection, Rapture’s Road, due 11 January 2024 from Jonathan Cape. When I read Seán’s work, I am always floored by this contradiction, that I am reading a timeless classic, and yet its writer is still very much alive, and still so relatively early in his writing career. Rapture’s Road ascends beyond even Tongues of Fire, which is no small feat; my favourite from his debut collection is ‘Adoration’, which ends “my head is tilted up to God / and I am a wild thing, glowing.” I thought of these lines often in Rapture’s Road, as it moves through the natural world with a visionary, mystic quality, dreamlike, more vivid than life. Though the poems all stand on their own feet, they are joined together as if in a sequence, leading down a Divine Comedy-esque journey, through the dark heart of grief into joy and love. I’d read and loved some of the poems before, published in places like Granta (the first ‘Dispersion Song’, ‘Go to the lamplight’, ‘Haw’), Fourteen Poems (‘Immran’), Fine Press Poetry (‘Evening, with Ghost Moths’, published as a beautiful broadside, which I treasure!). But I was not prepared for the range and depth of the new poems, even though I had utter faith in Seán to stun me again. From the opening poem ‘A Ministry’ I was already emotional; poems like ‘We didn’t mean to kill Mr Flynn’, which explores historical homophobia in Ireland, ‘Night Ballad’, which examines the natural world in decay (“all wonder is lost/to the coal and the petrol fume”), and ‘Whoso List to Hunt’, evoking sensuality in the natural world, all build towards this spiralling sense of the endeavour, a world beautiful and terrible, damned by loss and redeemed by love. A brief series of grief poems, starting from ‘Still’ and its “some dreamt-of heaven”, and finishing with the breath-catching ‘Snows’, delivers the collection’s most potent moments. Elsewhere, I found myself on a loop, re-reading poems like ‘St Jude’s’, ‘Night-Scented Stock’, the Hopkins-inflected sonnet ‘Skylarks, and the final poem, ‘Nightfall’, which ends, as the collection began, at night, but a night defined by the addressee, “Love”, unlike the isolation of ‘A Ministry’, which is addressed to the voice’s own feet. Of course, Seán inadvertently sums up his own collection better than I ever could, in ‘And so, small singer in the flood’: “I sat / in the wintered tree of my mind // to find grief's antiphon, to knock / a note clear, to make a gift or reparation / from memory's echoing song —“. I can’t wait for the rest of the world to walk down Rapture’s Road and hear that same echoing song with me.
June 9, 2025
I don’t know if I’ve ever been as blown away by the opening poem of a collection as I was by A Ministry, the first poem in Seán Hewitt’s Rapture’s Road—
Little bird, he likes it when I break
among the tamarisk, the feather-moss,
setting the paper wings in the grass
aflight.
—there’s an intimacy, something deeply unsettling. I initially read the poem as circling themes of sexual assault or unspoken trauma, held in the body like a secret. It’s not what the poem says, but what it suggests, that devastates:
…When I break,
I break, predictably into song.
This line encapsulates so much of the collection’s emotional terrain—how pain can contort itself into lyric, not as catharsis but as inevitability.
In Dispersion Song, Hewitt’s imagery becomes more brutal and bodily:
the one bent over himself, emptying
the animal of his body over the earth—
show your wound to him, stranger.
It’s a moment of exposure. The recurrence of the title Dispersion Song—two poems bearing the same name—feels like a deliberate echo of William Blake, another poet of spiritual fracture and ecstatic repetition. Hewitt’s dialogue with literary history is textured and reverent, never ornamental.
Even a line like “they made my own life drown me” (We Didn’t Mean to Kill Mr Flynn) lands like a gut-punch. Meanwhile, rhyme re-emerges in Night Ballad and End Ballad, which I am forever glad to see done sincerely.
One of the most striking moments:
…like God,
Into a bird, I tried to throw myself
Out of myself and into my word—
Here is poetry not just describing transformation, but undergoing it. Night Scented Stock echoes A Ministry, creating a circling, haunted structure across the book.
Rapture’s Road is a luminous and unsettling collection. It breaks, but it breaks into song.
Little bird, he likes it when I break
among the tamarisk, the feather-moss,
setting the paper wings in the grass
aflight.
—there’s an intimacy, something deeply unsettling. I initially read the poem as circling themes of sexual assault or unspoken trauma, held in the body like a secret. It’s not what the poem says, but what it suggests, that devastates:
…When I break,
I break, predictably into song.
This line encapsulates so much of the collection’s emotional terrain—how pain can contort itself into lyric, not as catharsis but as inevitability.
In Dispersion Song, Hewitt’s imagery becomes more brutal and bodily:
the one bent over himself, emptying
the animal of his body over the earth—
show your wound to him, stranger.
It’s a moment of exposure. The recurrence of the title Dispersion Song—two poems bearing the same name—feels like a deliberate echo of William Blake, another poet of spiritual fracture and ecstatic repetition. Hewitt’s dialogue with literary history is textured and reverent, never ornamental.
Even a line like “they made my own life drown me” (We Didn’t Mean to Kill Mr Flynn) lands like a gut-punch. Meanwhile, rhyme re-emerges in Night Ballad and End Ballad, which I am forever glad to see done sincerely.
One of the most striking moments:
…like God,
Into a bird, I tried to throw myself
Out of myself and into my word—
Here is poetry not just describing transformation, but undergoing it. Night Scented Stock echoes A Ministry, creating a circling, haunted structure across the book.
Rapture’s Road is a luminous and unsettling collection. It breaks, but it breaks into song.
April 17, 2024
[rating = B+]
I really like Hewitt's poetry, and I wish he was as popular and well-known in the States as he is in the UK (he's just as good if not better than Ocean Vuong). This is his second collection, and after thoroughly enjoying his first, I was excited to sink into this one. And it was excellent. He details Queer life and love, and he's so generous and considerate in the way he tells a story, a scene, a kiss.
However, and I disparage at writing this, Hewitt doesn't quite pull off what marvelous and the beauty apparent in his debut. "Rapture's Road" gets lost a bit. He's also prone to overusing images and words (like "Hawthorn" and "dress" and a few others). In one poem this scene or word has great power, but then it crops up in another a few pages later and loses its magic and sparkle.
Also, Hewitt has taken to ending poems with an em-dash. All of a sudden. Like almost every poem finishes with one. Now, this could try to depict the idea that the poem is never really finished, the effect not yet dissipated; that you are meant to continue and add each poem's "meaning" (or whatever word you prefer) up. Even the last poem in the collection does this. Maybe I'm overthinking this, but I've never seen this done before, and I can't quite understand why it's being done. Anyways, the collection was still interesting and I loved reading about Queer love but also about the struggles facing Queer people, very relatable (and sometimes not as much, because we are individuals too).
I really like Hewitt's poetry, and I wish he was as popular and well-known in the States as he is in the UK (he's just as good if not better than Ocean Vuong). This is his second collection, and after thoroughly enjoying his first, I was excited to sink into this one. And it was excellent. He details Queer life and love, and he's so generous and considerate in the way he tells a story, a scene, a kiss.
However, and I disparage at writing this, Hewitt doesn't quite pull off what marvelous and the beauty apparent in his debut. "Rapture's Road" gets lost a bit. He's also prone to overusing images and words (like "Hawthorn" and "dress" and a few others). In one poem this scene or word has great power, but then it crops up in another a few pages later and loses its magic and sparkle.
Also, Hewitt has taken to ending poems with an em-dash. All of a sudden. Like almost every poem finishes with one. Now, this could try to depict the idea that the poem is never really finished, the effect not yet dissipated; that you are meant to continue and add each poem's "meaning" (or whatever word you prefer) up. Even the last poem in the collection does this. Maybe I'm overthinking this, but I've never seen this done before, and I can't quite understand why it's being done. Anyways, the collection was still interesting and I loved reading about Queer love but also about the struggles facing Queer people, very relatable (and sometimes not as much, because we are individuals too).
April 6, 2024
Rating: 5 stars
Poetry is often called "transcendental". I had never felt that feeling before this collection. Hewitt crafts a collection so well thought, so put together. They work in ways you don't expect, perhaps in ways he hasn't even realised. The homage he pays to Agha Shahid Ali is commendable.
I love this collection. You should read this TODAY, in fact, why haven't you ordered your copy yet????
Poetry is often called "transcendental". I had never felt that feeling before this collection. Hewitt crafts a collection so well thought, so put together. They work in ways you don't expect, perhaps in ways he hasn't even realised. The homage he pays to Agha Shahid Ali is commendable.
I love this collection. You should read this TODAY, in fact, why haven't you ordered your copy yet????
May 25, 2024
Such beautiful and urgent poetry. Desire and darkness unravel together in a forest of Hewitt’s creation. The style of some of these poems echo Wordsworth and Keats; you can really see how Hewitt reworks tradition to examine the relationship between queerness and nature for a contemporary audience. Mesmerising.
“I could have spent a thousand lives changing myself, dipping my body over and over in those bracing, fluent desires -“
“I could have spent a thousand lives changing myself, dipping my body over and over in those bracing, fluent desires -“
January 12, 2025
"All night,/like God into a flower, like God/into a bird, I tried to throw myself/out of myself and into my word — "
Hewitt's verse is lush and lyrical, framing queer desire and nature in an almost Romantic style. Sometimes the richness of his language makes his verse rather opaque and hard to parse, but his poems about the killing of Declan Flynn shines with grief and fury, an intensely moving sequence that felt like a display of his poetic abilities at their fullest force.
Hewitt's verse is lush and lyrical, framing queer desire and nature in an almost Romantic style. Sometimes the richness of his language makes his verse rather opaque and hard to parse, but his poems about the killing of Declan Flynn shines with grief and fury, an intensely moving sequence that felt like a display of his poetic abilities at their fullest force.
February 26, 2024
secretive speaking effervescent scenes, mulch and earth and sparks like gold tails, white moth wings and pines and ghosts, pollen, fields, and waters with minds and sometimes the dogs sometimes the 'dark-haired youth' in 'flame-stitched tunic' sometimes God
June 30, 2024
just stunningly gorgeous and deeply, painfully affecting, even haunting, at times. ‘we didn’t mean to kill mr flynn’ especially will stay with me for the rest of my life, if the way i keep tearing up when i think about it is anything to go by.
April 28, 2025
Not used to reading poetry, found some striking lines and it did hold my interest. The little diversity was explained on reading afterwards of the residency. Yes, I would read another, liked the nature descriptions.
June 27, 2025
One of my favorite poetry books of all time. Incredibly tender and brutal at the same time. I felt seen in an intimate almost uncomfortable way. Stunning work, the words I read will linger in my mind and in my heart.
February 29, 2024
An erudite mix of hope, mourning, and appreciation of form.
March 2, 2024
Really love how hauntingly peaceful this book is despite it's apocalyptic setting. Some of my favourite poems are:
Dispersion Song
Nightfall
Haw
Sleep Walk
A Ministry
Dispersion Song
Nightfall
Haw
Sleep Walk
A Ministry
March 13, 2024
4.5, really. There are so many poems in here that are 5 stars for me (in other words, made me cry/feel very emotional in their own specific ways).
June 10, 2024
Holy shit this was just absolutely beautiful. I’ve been rendered speechless.
5/5
5/5
July 23, 2024
Stunning, gorgeous, lush, mystical, rich with the most delicious imagery.
December 4, 2024
seán hewitt the poet you are
March 17, 2025
i wish i could understand what he was talking about.
March 28, 2025
Shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas prize , this is a stunning collection of poetry , nature, sexuality and grief . I read it twice and will certainly read again .
May 18, 2025
“All night,
like God into a flower, like God
into a bird, I tried to throw myself
out of myself and into my word”
!!!!! every poem is stunning
like God into a flower, like God
into a bird, I tried to throw myself
out of myself and into my word”
!!!!! every poem is stunning
December 5, 2025
For the first time ever I cried while reading poetry
December 28, 2025
Hewitt is a poet born in England of Irish parents. His poetry is exquisite. This is his second volume.
February 7, 2024
beyond the light of memory
behind your life
there might be
other lives, waiting --
behind your life
there might be
other lives, waiting --
March 20, 2025
Shortlisted for the 2025 Dylan Thomas Prize
I read this poetry collection – the author’s second – due to its longlisting for the Dylan Thomas Prize, a prize for authors writing in English aged 39 and under (Thomas himself having died at that age) which is open to novels, short story collections, poetry collections and plays.
I must admit poetry is not my preferred literary medium so that this is normally the only time of the year that I would read poetry and I found it much easier to engage with the author’s upcoming debut novel “Open, Heaven” albeit there are clear thematic and stylistic overlaps between the two with ideas of queer love and the natural world and the interaction of the two and I understand the links are even clearer in the author’s debut poetry collection “Tongues of Fire” (which is very much about the unexpected death of the poet’s father, more of an underlying theme here – note that in “Open. Heaven” there is too a sense of loss and mourning but in that case for a formative teenage relationship).
The poems as far as I can tell are set in a imagined landscape which is something like a fantastical variation on the landscape around the author’s hometown of Dublin - the imagined and actual blending strongly at one case in my favourite poem “We Didn’t Mean to Kill Mr Flynn” about the historical murder of a man by a queer-bashing gang in a Dublin Park in 1982 – my favourite as it was one of the very few where I felt I had purchase on the imagery (aided here by extensive footnotes) and which ends (and note the signifiers of the footnotes).
Elsewhere there is:
Some beautiful imagery of moths (the merveille du jour for example “art deco mint-green herringbone. Soft furred little absinthe warrior”) - a recurring theme and image which ties into the mourning sub-theme;
Much walking around midnight woods (which sometimes allude to, or even reveal, homosexual trysts including with some more earthy imagery of stags);
Ideas of fluidity and ambiguity of identity;
Quasi-spiritual, diaphanous and ephemeral imagery – whose meaning I think often eluded me but which was often beautiful to read.
So I think an admirable collection but one a little too elusive for my limited poetic appreciation skills.
I dreamt of a field,
A phosphorescent dawn -
amphibious light,
drenched and jubilant,
and you were there -
in a field of asphodel, and a voice
like God's was singing
over the fired hills, some word
like rapture repeated
rising so the dream shook -
the hills, then the field, the images
of the world all falling into time, and the two of us
were standing as before
on the island
of our last hour -
Abide with me
in the single chapel
of the sun.
Can I dip
into you for comfort?
Love, all beauty
I read this poetry collection – the author’s second – due to its longlisting for the Dylan Thomas Prize, a prize for authors writing in English aged 39 and under (Thomas himself having died at that age) which is open to novels, short story collections, poetry collections and plays.
I must admit poetry is not my preferred literary medium so that this is normally the only time of the year that I would read poetry and I found it much easier to engage with the author’s upcoming debut novel “Open, Heaven” albeit there are clear thematic and stylistic overlaps between the two with ideas of queer love and the natural world and the interaction of the two and I understand the links are even clearer in the author’s debut poetry collection “Tongues of Fire” (which is very much about the unexpected death of the poet’s father, more of an underlying theme here – note that in “Open. Heaven” there is too a sense of loss and mourning but in that case for a formative teenage relationship).
The poems as far as I can tell are set in a imagined landscape which is something like a fantastical variation on the landscape around the author’s hometown of Dublin - the imagined and actual blending strongly at one case in my favourite poem “We Didn’t Mean to Kill Mr Flynn” about the historical murder of a man by a queer-bashing gang in a Dublin Park in 1982 – my favourite as it was one of the very few where I felt I had purchase on the imagery (aided here by extensive footnotes) and which ends (and note the signifiers of the footnotes).
I drowned on it, they said. They made
my own life drown me.* Then, my father
weeping by the fire.
A betraying kiss, perhaps,
but no stone rolled back, no ascension.
They walked out of court free, he said
but my son cannot walk out of Glasnevin. +
Elsewhere there is:
Some beautiful imagery of moths (the merveille du jour for example “art deco mint-green herringbone. Soft furred little absinthe warrior”) - a recurring theme and image which ties into the mourning sub-theme;
Much walking around midnight woods (which sometimes allude to, or even reveal, homosexual trysts including with some more earthy imagery of stags);
Ideas of fluidity and ambiguity of identity;
Quasi-spiritual, diaphanous and ephemeral imagery – whose meaning I think often eluded me but which was often beautiful to read.
So I think an admirable collection but one a little too elusive for my limited poetic appreciation skills.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 30 reviews