Tongues of Fire: From the award-winning author of Open, Heaven

by Seán Hewitt

** WINNER OF THE LAUREL PRIZE 2021 ****A SPECTATOR AND IRISH TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020****SHORTLISTED FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES / UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK YOUNG WRITER OF THE YEAR AWARD 2020****SHORTLISTED FOR THE JOHN POLLARD FOUNDATION INTERNATIONAL POETRY PRIZE 2021****SHORTLISTED FOR THE DALKEY LITERARY EMERGING WRITER OF THE YEAR AWARD 2021**A remarkable first collection by an important new poetIn this collection, Seán Hewitt gives us poems of a rare musicality and grace. By turns searing and meditative, these are lyrics concerned with the matter of the world, its physicality, but also attuned to the proximity of each moment, each thing, to the spiritual. Here, there is sex, grief, and loss, but also a committed dedication to life, hope and renewal. Drawing on the religious, the sacred and the profane, this is a collection in which men meet in the woods, where matter is corrupted and remade. There are prayers, hymns, vespers, incantations, and longer poems which attempt to propel themselves towards the transcendent. In this book, there is always the sense of fragility allied with strength, a violence harnessed and unleashed. The collection ends with a series of elegies for the poet's in the face of despair, we are met with a fierce brightness, and a reclamation of the spiritual. 'This is when / we make God, and speak in his voice.'Paying close attention to altered states and the consolations and strangeness of the natural world, this is the first book from a major poet.

Genres: Poetry, Queer, LGBT, Irish Literature, Ireland, Gay, Nature

71 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 23, 2020

About the author

Seán 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.

Reviews

[Charles Edwards-Freshwater · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poetry is such a deeply personal form that I do sometimes find it difficult to rate. However, Hewitt's small collection of poems were exactly the sort of salve I needed in 2020.

Beautifully evocative, Hewitt blends the beauty of nature with personal experience in a pensive, almost mischievous manner, resulting in poems that, although simple, are wonderfully powerful and linger beautifully after reading.

I particularly liked the poem "Dryad" - one of the longer entries in the anthology and one that I think really nicely captures the celebration of nature contrasted against the grounded experiences and interesting sexual undertones that the author has weaved through.

I did find a few of the poems a bit less intoxicating than the others, and there are a few entries to this tiny anthology that I didn't personally resonate with - something which in such a small collection is a shame as they detracted from the overall experience.

Still, a beautiful selection filled with wind strewn heaths and woodlice-dripping plants, the language of trees and the subtle touch of human experience against nature. Very beautiful indeed.

4 stars.

[Gerhard · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved, loved this. Up to the 'Suibhine' section, for which there is zero context. Regional poets have to negotiate a global grammar. Which is okay ... but it screams niche, no matter how good you are. You need a spark, frisson.

'Dryad' is my new go to nature/sex poem. Sublime.

[Andrew H · Rating 4 out of 5]

At the opening of Theories and Apparitions Mark Doty writes about a pipistrelle. Well, actually, he writes about his view of a bat compared to Charles Bennet's poetical view of a bat. USA v UK. Whitman v Wordsworth. Eventually, the bat disappears from view as Doty turns it into an aesthetic object and reduces a natural living form to a dead symbol of lyric v meditation. Doty is Doty is Doty. A taxidermist poet. Sean Hewitt has acknowledged a debt to Doty and his tendency to symbolise nature floods over into Tongues of Fire. In Hewitt's words, "trees, or birds, are artefacts of history, biology, weather, all those things we might think of as the mind of the world." Very in tune with Hopkins and instress/inscape. But is nature an "artefact"? An object "made" by a human being? It is a viewpoint I cannot concede and one that produces some odd effects. "Barn Owls in Suffolk" is an an accomplished poem, but some words strike oddly. The faces of barn owls have a "strange geometry". Do they? The adjective seems to have been chosen to add mystery to the poem, not to describe a barn owl accurately -- to develop a sense of "omen". In other words, to make the bird become a symbol of something to man rather than be themselves. Hewitt's lines imagine the poise of the bird perfectly, but the conclusion of the poem cannot rest with that: the owl lifts a "living thing" from the earth. A vole, mouse, shrew, fledgling bird? No, an abstraction that establishes the owl as a "strange" creature, a harbinger of doom. Something similar occurs in "Dryad". A woodland is evoked, one that becomes a place where Hewitt's seeks men, and a natural habitat slowly transforms into another artefact of the human mind, a place where trees stand like men "making slow/laboured sighs" as if they are in tune with sex and human trunk and tree trunk are one. The artificiality here, as with Doty, makes very pretty poetry. But the art is too obviously art. "Lapwings", according to another poet, is " a poem whose natural beauty is all Clare." Quite the opposite is true, for Clare would have related the behaviour of the bird, its plumage, the cryptic eggs, their colour and texture, captured it in earthly diction; not dug up something as vague as "cheee-o-wit of something like life whipping upwards."

Having said this, however, there is much to enjoy in Hewitt and he certainly can write evocatively. "Vestige," "Epithalamium," and 'Wild Garlic" are magnificent lyrics. And he handles elegy with grace and honesty -- "Tongues of Fire" is a testament to his humanity and filial love. At his best, he shows a wonderful ear for music and emotional cadences. And he certainly know how to move an image and develop a poem. I have quibbled, but also read the book three times without stopping except for reflection -- that is rare!

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the title poem, the arboreal fungus from the cover serves as “a bright, ancestral messenger // bursting through from one realm to another” like “the cones of God, the Pentecostal flame”. This debut collection is alive with striking imagery that draws links between the natural and the supernatural. 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: “I came back often, // year on year, kneeling and being knelt for / in acts of secret worship, and now / each woodland smells quietly of sex”. Hewitt recalls travels to Berlin and Sweden, and charts his father’s rapid decline and death from an advanced cancer. A central section of translations of the middle-Irish legend “Buile Suibhne” is less memorable than the gorgeous portraits of flora and fauna and the moving words dedicated to the poet’s father: “You are not leaving, I know, // but shifting into image – my head / already is haunted with you” and “In this world, I believe, / there is nothing lost, only translated”.

Readalikes: Physical by Andrew McMillan and If All the World and Love Were Young by Stephen Sexton

Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.

[Siobhan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tongues of Fire a collection of poetry that focuses on viewing life through nature, on physicality and reality but also the sacred and untouchable, and on grief, loss, and illness. The poems are mostly short lyric poems, weaving together ideas of nature, belief, and personal connection. What is particularly vivid as you read the collection is the ways in which the natural world is returned to, and offers an escape from the world, and how the poems show this through moments and details of plants and settings as ways of encapsulating feelings, from sex and desire to sadness and grief. This felt particularly notable in poems like 'Adoration', which moves from a nature walk to a Berlin club and back again, and it really gives a sense of how the personal can also be part of something much larger about life and earth.

These poems feel like an escape into the tiny details of outside, a kind of mechanism of looking for the natural and the meaning when things seem random or difficult. This was a great collection to sit down with and become immersed in the senses and physicality, but also the emotions of the poems.

[Sean Mitchell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Right off the bat: Mr Hewitt does not fill the void left by Heaney, Montague and Boland, as one journalist wrote. Maybe he will in 20-30 years time, after the bodies aren't quite so warm and after he's produced more than one pamphlet and one collection. Certainly there is great promise, but please don't fall for the hype that has raised this book beyond what it actually achieves. This is very well crafted lyric fare and, as such, comparisons to practitioners of the Irish lyric tradition are warranted. (But let's remember Hewitt was born in raised in England, although he has strong familial and professional connections with Ireland.)

It is a collection that might have been written 30-40 years ago, save for the gay subject matter of a few of these poems -- most notably 'Dryad', which truly is a fantastic poem that raises its subject matter (gay cruising in a wood) to a brave and defiant act that borders on the mythic. Stunning. And it's when there is some daring exhibited that these poems really come alive. But so often it is the easy route that Hewitt takes in terms of the same old Oirsh and Ye-Olde-English lyric sensibility. As beautifully crafted as they are, when compared to the exciting risks taken by young Irish/English poets -- and when we consider the explosion of risk-taking winging its way across the Atlantic from N0rth America -- I'm left hoping that this fledgling talent decides to jump off a few more cliffs in order to see if he can soar. I suspect he can, even if he crashes a few times. And, after all, sometimes it is the crashes that are more interesting and point to what needs changing in order to progress successfully.

So, a very interesting debut collection, which deserves a read. But question the hype.

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

Initial / shorter review:
“Leave me always // in these waste spaces, where / my head is tilted up to God / and I am a wild thing, glowing.” So ends Seán Hewitt’s ‘Adoration’, one of forty exquisite, tender, exultant and exalted poems in his debut collection, Tongues of Fire. Fifteen poems, ten of which are in the first section, were first published in Hewitt’s iridescent pamphlet Lantern, though many appear as if anew, from subtle singular word changes in such poems as ‘Leaf’ and ‘Clock’ to three evocative new lines in ‘Dormancy’.

As for the twenty-five new poems, they represent a veritable feast for the senses, many just as steeped in nature and the divine as the earlier poems from Lantern, many of them moving deeper into these territories and more, charting an unparalleled psychic topography, a survey of sex and want and love and grief, and how time transforms these things and the individual, their spirit. In ‘Ghost’ he writes “there is always the soul waiting / at the door of the body, asking to be let out.” Throughout these poems Seán does just that, letting out his soul, inviting ours to let themselves free, for a short while.

The second section of poems, a partial translation of Buile Suibhne, present a dark narrative steeped in curses and madness and violence, that somehow insists upon devotion and beauty, the cries of the heron, and the necessity of companionship, a fact which hits closer to home than ever in ‘Suibhne Is Wounded, And Confesses’: “but things are different now.”

Seán Hewitt may be our generation’s answer to/lovechild of John Clare and Gerard Manley Hopkins, especially seen in ‘Vestige’, which directly quotes from Hopkins’ diary, and Lapwings, a poem whose natural beauty is all Clare and whose essence, rhythms and phrases evoke Hopkins at his ‘Windhover’ best: “embers gashed... the sound was dropped, / caught, then dashed to earth.”

As the poems move towards their end they acquire an increasingly acute taste of grief, as his “pre-elegies” for his father ask us to consider such things that we may never be able to fathom: “Are we all / just wanting to see ourselves / changed, made unearthly?” he asks in ‘Petition’, and ‘“How am I to wear / his love’s burning mantle?”, the final lines of ‘In The Bode-Museum’.

The final poems, ‘Tree of Jesse’, ‘Ta Prohm’ and the titular ‘Tongues of Fire’, invoke the most gorgeous and devastating blend of hope and loss, so the final few stanzas of this book - which proclaim “Our life is a theophany” and that “there is nothing lost, only translated” - are some of the most transcendent lines to ever be committed to verse. In the image of “yellow fruiting / thorns”, “the Pentacostal flame”, the collection’s title and its final poem define its search for the soul, spiritual communication through the natural world, which joins us to one another, to the earth we have come from, and to whatever place we are “translated” to when we go.

Hewitt’s poems are, to borrow a line from ‘St John’s Wort’, “a light to illumine / the dark caves of your eyes”. Today I am illumined, and what a genuine blessing that seems to be. This is already one of the most vital collections of recent time and it was only published yesterday. It’s the first book I read cover-to-cover twice in one go, and I can’t wait to go back for a third time, and a fourth, and more.

Later / longer review:
“For woods are forms of grief / grown from the earth”: Seán Hewitt’s debut full-length collection of poems, Tongues of Fire, begins in familiar territory, both figuratively and literally: of the forty exquisite, tender, exultant and exalted poems, fifteen were previously published in his acclaimed pamphlet Lantern, and ten of these iridescent poems appear in the first of four sections in Tongues of Fire. (Incidentally, only two poems did not make the jump from Lantern – ‘And I will lay down a votive to my silver birch’, and ‘Waterlily’.)

Some of the poems which return are changelings, altered in slight and subtle ways. ‘Dormancy’ has gained an additional three lines: “Like hanging wombs – / ghosts of seed speaking / in their dried-out bristle of tree-skin.” ‘Leaf’, the first poem of both books, is not identically transposed. Now, in Tongues of Fire, it ends “For even in the nighttime of life / it is worth living, just to hold it.”, while in Lantern, the poem ended slightly differently: “just hold it”. And so a single word has been added, substantially changing the meaning of the line, the poem. The weight of this “to”, this amendment of the verb from imperative to infinitive, is exactly the kind of subtlety in communication which Tongues of Fire is concerned with.

The book also houses twenty-five new poems, a veritable feast for the senses, many just as steeped in nature and the divine as the earlier poems from Lantern, many of them moving deeper into these territories and more, charting an unparalleled psychic topography, a survey of sex and want and love and grief, and how time transforms these things and the individual, their spirit. In ‘Ghost’ Hewitt notes that “there is always the soul waiting / at the door of the body, asking to be let out.” Throughout these poems Hewitt does just that, letting out his soul, inviting ours to let themselves free too, for a short while.

The second section of poems, a partial translation of Buile Suibhne, presents a dark narrative steeped in curses, madness, violence, that somehow insists upon devotion and beauty, the cries of the heron, and the necessity of companionship. This fact hits closer to home now than ever in ‘Suibhne Is Wounded, And Confesses’: “things are different now.” Seán Hewitt may be our generation’s answer to/lovechild of John Clare and Gerard Manley Hopkins, especially seen in ‘Vestige’, which directly quotes from Hopkins’ diary, and Lapwings, a poem whose natural beauty is quintessential Clare and whose essence, rhythms and phrases invoke Hopkins at his ‘Windhover’ best: “embers gashed... the sound was dropped, / caught, then dashed to earth.”

Perhaps unavoidably, to write on nature and its beauty is to write about life and death, sex and the soul. Death stalks these pages, but sex is resilient against it, from the vividly sensual ‘Callery Pear’ to the youthful ‘Dryad’. Hewitt’s most jubilant lines come from ‘Adoration’, a poem which moves through the “organ-warm, pulsing” interior of a club in Berlin, where “a white pill held up, / broken”, this ecstatic quais-eucharist, propels joy through movement and union: “and then the music, a congregation / undoing their bodies over / and over into beaming shapes.”

Earlier in the collection, back in ‘Ghost’, Hewitt conjures queer togetherness: “I knew, even then, the rumours about him… how we might share, / once the truth was out, a bond, an elective bond.” These images of queer bodies and their safe closeness, their unabashed glory, manifest themselves perfectly in ‘Adoration’ and resonate far beyond the club, even later in “some dimension / we’d slipped into by chance.” But it’s the end of the poem where Hewitt – returned to his familiar expansive “heath”, the freedom of exterior space – reaches the zenith of love and submission, pleading “Leave me always // in these waste spaces, where / my head is tilted up to God / and I am a wild thing, glowing.” With Hewitt, we do not need to go searching for the divine: it is here, it moves us and moves in us.

There is a gradual move towards the Pentecostal, beginning there. As the poems move towards their end they acquire an increasingly acute taste of grief, as Hewitt’s “pre-elegies” for his father ask us to consider such things that we may never be able to fathom: “Are we all / just wanting to see ourselves / changed, made unearthly?” he asks in ‘Petition’, and ‘“How am I to wear / his love’s burning mantle?”, the final lines of ‘In The Bode-Museum’. The last trio of poems, ‘Tree of Jesse’, ‘Ta Prohm’ and the titular ‘Tongues of Fire’, evoke the most gorgeous and devastating blend of hope and loss, so that the final few stanzas of this book – which proclaim “Our life is a theophany” and that “there is nothing lost, only translated” – are some of the most transcendent lines to ever be committed to verse.

In the image of “yellow fruiting / thorns”, “the Pentacostal flame”, the doubleness of this collection’s title and its final poem define Hewitt’s search for the soul, for spiritual communication through the natural world, joining us to one another, to the earth we have come from, and to whatever place we are “translated” when we go. In the very final lines of the poem/book, Hewitt is “asking over and over // for correlation – that when all is done, / and we are laid down in the earth, we might / listen, and hear love spoken back to us.” This poem is rich with real-life grief, and yet it is nourishing, this collection a testament to life and its glorious vibrant living, to enduring love and the seemingly boundless capacity of the human soul. Hewitt’s poems are, to borrow a line from ‘St John’s Wort’, “a light to illumine / the dark caves of your eyes”. Today I am illumined, and what a genuine blessing that is.

[Ricky Schneider · Rating 4 out of 5]

In anticipation of this poet's upcoming release of his memoir, I decided to pick up his poetry and I'm thrilled to have discovered this queer Irish writer in his hauntingly powerful first book of poetry. His intrinsic Irish sensibility combined with an almost surrealist interpretation of nature have me transfixed and excited to see what's next for this gifted young artist.

The poems take the reader on an odyssey from pastoral metaphors to mythical retellings and, finally, a heartrending depiction of the poet's grief for his dying father. Sprinkled within these uniquely stylized worlds, Hewitt includes subtly but distinctly queer perspectives on each of these more ubiquitous themes. His writing is often opaque but still emotionally and aesthetically acute.

Tongues of Fire is a sprawling display of the poet's unique and mesmerizing lens with which he transmutes his love, longing and grief. The language is powerful and profound without becoming cloying, supercilious or succumbing to melodramatic indulgence. Every poem feels concise and inspired. I relished the experience of drifting into Hewitt's lush and languid land of melancholy.

[Marek Torčík · Rating 5 out of 5]

"... but even now
I could not say which was the truer thought:

the cats or the lost child; and I think again
of calling home that night from Sweden,
of hearing my mother's voice and telling her
what you had done (tablets, rum, calling

to say goodbye), and how I made
an animal sound, a noise so primitive
that I felt inhuman, how I cried
like something new-born

because I had found myself
in a world where all abstract things
(death, fear, loss) had bloomed in my mind,
and what is a parent to a child but god

who we turn to when we still believe
that everything is fixable,..."

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gifted, virtuosic; a stunning work of poetry worthy of everyone's time.

[Rosamund Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Full of lyric meditations on nature, as well as explorations of loss, despair and sexuality, this is a memorable debut. Sean Hewitt has a gift for evoking the beauty and subtlety of nature, such as the bark of an oak tree, or the colours and shapes of a fungus. He also translates sections from the Medieval Irish poem, Buile Suibhne, previously translated by Heaney, which is itself a poem that describes the ever-changing natural world, as well as the ways in which madness can be soothed, and reflected, by nature. Hewitt has a gift for using an image of the natural world to explore a personal grief or moment of deep emotion, such as in Kyrie, in which "the darker shapes of two cats / mating" bring him to a moment "so close to life, to its truth of violence / that my mind has wired out" and he goes on describe how, in moments of profound pain or fear, we continue to long for our parents, "what is a parent to a child but a god". In Adoration, one of my favourite poems in the collection, Hewitt also draws on the colours and changes of the natural world: " a gold / lobe on the oak, leaking // in the mist", which brings him to memories of a club in Berlin, "its vaulted columns, the steel bars / and long-stemmed lilies, and the heat / scouring our skin." Here, the author is brought to a place of life, where "bloom and spirit [are] unspooling". Like nature, this place of sexuality and lust, brings the narrator to a place "soft and secret and unseen". In the same stanza, the narrator admits "I knew / I would kneel to you - blood, yes, / spine, lips." Hewitt travels a great distance in this poem, between moments within a relationship, as well as between countries -- Ireland, Berlin -- and places -- a club, a road, a heath -- and times -- summer, winter -- but remains in control. The poem carries us through tensions of love and lust, to the tartness of a blackberry, and to a place of contemplation, and, yes, adoration. There is something so moving about the narrator admitting, "I would kneel to you": an acceptance of how devotion makes us vulnerable.

At his best, Hewitt travels far within his work and explores the world with originality and depth. Some poems were not so successful, I found, because Hewitt sacrifices the rawness and messiness of emotions and bodies in order to create a poem that is aesthetically beautiful. There were places, particularly as Hewitt describes grief at the loss of a father, where the poems didn't convey the weight and intensity of pain. However, this is an impressive first collection, and one that I would recommend.

[Alarie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I haven’t read much contemporary Irish poetry, and nature poetry isn’t usually at the top of my list, but when a poet writes this beautifully, categories don’t matter. Hewitt takes us with him as he wanders in the woods, finding himself, peace, and inspiration. The poems are hushed, whispers, a balm for our jarring nerves during the pandemic.

There was a section of poems, I believe translations, of an Irish folk figure Buile Suibhne that would probably mean more to those who know the legend. The rest of the book had universal appeal.

Trees are the stars of many of Hewitt’s poems. Here are a few passages I especially admired.

From “Leaf”

“For woods are forms of grief
grown from the earth. For they creak

with the weight of it.
For each tree is an altar to time.”

From “Clocks”

…and though I love you and I know
there is no such thing as held time,

this tree seems suddenly like a stillness,
a circle of quiet air, a place to stand

now that I have had to leave
and cannot think where I might go next.”

[gorecki · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book of poems. Of invocations and summoning. Of prayers to and within nature. Of raising trees from words, many trees, and then kneeling under them ready to pray or beg or praise.

“Later still, the baby would not latch,
and I came back to this holly, unhardened

by the sun, unable to turn the light
into strength. May it keep its whiteness,
may it never learn the use of spikes;

or, in time, when a crown is made of it,
may the people approach one by one
to witness how a fragile thing is raised.”

“But then, in each of us, a wound must be made
or given - there is always the soul waiting
at the door of the body, asking to be let out.”

And there really is a lot of soul-letting here, in the invoked images and in the space left between the lines for rapid gulps of air. With his poems, Seán Hewitt creates a forest and then lets it speak its own verses about everything it witnesses: pain inflicted on oneself and others, love, both physical and in the heart, and spells to bind them all together.

[Khrustalyov · Rating 4 out of 5]

Over the past decade or more there has been a lot published by young Irish poets, and perhaps even more published about them. They have been an edgy breed that, while not exactly turning their backs on literary traditions, have attempted to update the ostensible content of their poems. A poem about a Tinder date that acts as an allegory for Ireland's continued patriarchy would almost be a cliche by now, as would one that questions, quite rightly, the place of nature in Ireland's literature. They can at times read like the poetic corollary of the Sally Rooney phenomenon in novels. At their best they can express something vital about how Ireland has been changed by neoliberalism and the beginnings of multiculturalism. Although they can sometimes seem to be a decade behind discourse in the UK, a bit too second wave and only now thinking about other forms of oppression beyond gender. That's more or less fine, but at their worst these poets can be wringing far too much out of each sentence, with imagery dripping too precipitously through even short poems - Doireann Ní Ghríofa comes to mind here.

Sean Hewitt is a different breed of Irish poet. For a start, he's more English than Irish. Yet, it is the steeping of his work within the traditions of Yeats and Heaney, as much as his Irish mother and place of residence, that make him part of this wave of Irish poets. He is different from many of his contemporaries too because of his commitment to form in a way that is often lost among the slew of poems in the journals that often become too inward looking - too consumed by a constant search for new images to express personal hurt to think seriously about rhythm and other elements that make a poem different from line-broken prose.

Tongues of Fire is at times teasing of a Heaney for the 2020s, although we don't always stay in that orbit. Hewitt is certainly similar to his many contemporaries for his interest in exploring sexuality - in particular his own gayness - a person's place in nature, and a young poet's place in the Irish and English traditions of nature poetry. But he is different too for the quiet craft that goes into his poems, the careful balance of words and rhythm across his favoured three-line verses. His explorations of sexuality and nature, which, as with his contemporaries, are fascinating, is matched by his exploration of poetic form and style.

The collection is a little uneven however, with some less ambitious poems in its centre, framed by bold work at the opening about sexual guilt and what it means to use nature imagery to express this, followed by deeply moving poems about his own father's death at the close. The nature poems too are uneven, with some slightly staid meditations peppered through the volume alongside brilliant works like 'Lapwing'.

I look forward to reading more of his work going forward - this was my first. Although I must admit a little trepidation for his recent prose efforts. Perhaps his novel 'Open, Heaven' is brilliant, but recent efforts by Ní Ghríofa and others to branch into prose have been financially necessary but artistically unconscionable. I know it's almost impossible to make a career as a poet - obviously a day job is required, but I mean even sticking to the writing over time - but I do hope Hewitt finds a way to stay with verse. It would be a travesty to lose this voice to just a few volumes.

[Cassandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

"In this world, I believe, there is nothing lost, only translated – our lives are shot through it and I am here this evening as a supplicant, asking over and over for correlation – that when all is done, and we are laid down in the earth, we might listen, and hear love spoken back to us."

What an experience!! THIS is poetry.
(the only thing that costs my rating a star is the many many MANY Gaelic references that I didn't have, which almost made this read academic. BUT overall: a masterpiece.)

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

People have reconnected to the natural world during lockdown in many ways, some are there for the fresh air and to get out away from the limits of our walls, others are there to walk the dog and some have found what has been missing from our lives of screens and 24-hour notifications.

This first collection from Seán Hewitt views all of life’s ups and downs through the physical elements of nature. But in these poems, he goes far deeper into our psyche and our intangible response to the things that we see around us. There are poems on birds, trees and dryads, ethereal beings that are said to come from oak.

There is more to this that just poems about the natural world, they touch on the sacred and the profane, the pure time and those stolen moments among lovers. His words add an important spiritual dimension, linking himself to the natural world.

this tree seems suddenly like a stillness
a circle of quiet air, a place to stand

now that I have had to leave
and cannot think where I might go next

I really liked this and I can’t exactly say why that is. Not for any specific reason, it is just a collection that is immersive and gets under your skin in all sorts of ways. The centre part is taken from the Irish tale, Buile Suibhn which I liked, but not as much as the rest of the book. His language is simple and charged with power and draws deep from the natural world. Stunning cover too.

Three Favourite Poems
Barn Owls in Suffolk
Dormancy
Wild Garlic

[Márcio · Rating 5 out of 5]

Though young, Seán Hewitt writes with such maturity that is hard to find these days. From memories of younger days to the Irish tale of Buile Suibne and the loss of a beloved one. I must say that the synopsis of the book is quite precise, and I'd just add that these poems talk to each other through elements and beautiful pictures of nature in its wonders.

Leaf
For woods are forms of grief
grown from the earth. For they creak
with the weight of it.
For each tree is an altar to time.
For the oak, whose every knot
guards a hushed cymbal of water.
For how the silver water holds
the heavens in its eye.
For the axletree of heaven
and the sleeping coil of wind
and the moon keeping watch.
For how each leaf traps light as it falls.
For even in the nighttime of life
it is worth living, just to hold it.

[Liván · Rating 5 out of 5]

Impresionante. Ni siquiera sé qué tanto opinar respecto a esta colección tan magistral de poemas, porque intentar diseccionarlo sería un disservice. Es una experiencia digna de vivirse. Point blank period.

Segunda lectura:
Había olvidado por qué este libro me gustaba tanto, pero tras leerlo de nuevo me encuentro con una experiencia tan rica que es como comprobar cualquier alabanza. Es un poemario bastante variado, estructurado en tres partes casi independientes, pero que se relacionan de manera dulce a través de símbolos comunes. Los poemas son sumamente íntimos, pero también descriptivos, y aunque algunas veces voluntariamente sencillos, profundamente vivenciales. La imagen más fugaz logra convertirse en un mundo completo a través de Seán Hewitt. Me encanta este libro !!!!!!!!!!!!!!! There I said it

[Euan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I spent a cosy afternoon in the company of Tongues of Fire. Hewitt’s debut collection gave me a sense of how he views the rhythms of nature and loss; the ways in which humans are capable of admiring/trespassing on the natural world.

The middle section of the collection is comprised of part translations of a middle-Irish tale named Buile Suibhne.
Throughout the collection, the poems that moved me most were those that explore sexuality, the frailty of loss and the comfort of nature.

[Laurence · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book of poetry is absolutely beautiful. Hewitt amazes me with every line. Nuances and subtleties, hidden meanings, motifs, and connections throughout. There is so much material to ponder. His poetry is gentle, melancholic, and thought-provoking. It is Art.

[Ed · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book by someone so clearly in love with trees, with all their forms, in love with the effect they have on him, willing to explore the way they’ve sculpted his life.
Willing to look at them deeply and at length, to give them the time to tell their secrets.

Especially so the cycle about Buile Suibhne, that, to me, seemed to be about the solace you can find in trees, how madness and sadness lose their sharp definiteness in such company.

So often they seem to hover and settle on the cusp of love and loss, between understanding and total wonderment, knowing that is where life exists too. Life speaks to itself in a language we don’t understand.

He turns the woods into a mystical talisman of life itself, speaking to itself in a language we can’t understand. So rich with things we cannot know

[Fern A · Rating 3 out of 5]

Poetry is difficult to rate as I feel it’s a very personal experience for each reader and what you will engage with or not depends on you and sometimes even can vary between reads. There were some poems in this I really enjoyed, especially as links with mythology and fable were made, however overall it didn’t massively stand out as a collection. Though who knows if I read it again, it might.

[Serge ♆ Neptune · Rating 4 out of 5]

Favourites: leaf, Oak Glossary, moors, tree of jesse

[Donal Murray · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely stunning poetry, dealing with themes of nature, relationships and drawing inspirations from the poet's own personal experience. One of the next greats, a must read!

[Maltheus Broman · Rating 2 out of 5]

Seán Hewitt’s Tongues of Fire contains many poems connecting nature, especially trees, with personal events and emotions. It leaves the reader with many unanswered questions.
*
Leaf — Is this, the first poem, the second part of the last poem? Is the collection a cycle? — Hewitt’s imagery tends to be rather idiosyncratic. Whether ‘woods are forms of grief grown from the earth’ might be questioned or accepted. This collection is full of such examples where images and metaphors feel strange, if not misplaced. At the end of the day, it often comes down to a matter of taste.
*
Dryad — In a forest the lyrical ego ponders on the nature of trees, while remembering how he gave head to another man under trees. There are three problems with this piece: Trees are said to be ‘an act / of kneeling to the earth, a way of bidding / the water to move’, whereas in the first poem trees are likened to grief. Now, maybe trees are all the things one wants them to be, but after a full list of things it simply begins to feel random. Secondly, the sex scene might be the coldest one in poetry history. The only thing we know about the other guy is that he has a deeper voice and evokes the idea he might be a killer. Thirdly, why is it that gay oral sex is paralleled to trees and then a line follows, stating ‘the children knocking branches for the showers / of seed’? The whole piece doesn’t feel quite right.
*
Häcksjon — A simple poem about jumping into a lake. Hewitt is at his best when he doesn’t dwell in overloads of weird metaphors, but stays within a clear scenery.
*
Kyrie — There’s bathos, and melodrama, and an anticlimactic end.
*
Dormancy — It’s hard to guess what some of these poems are even about. Not because they are mysterious themselves, but because information is just left out. Who is in the hospital? Why is this person sexless and unable? What does it mean that the lyrical ego sowed himself like a wych elm?
*
Psalm — Just as indecipherable as Dormancy. What happened under this bridge?
*
Wild Garlic — Beautiful. Shallow, yet beautiful.
*
Ilex — Reads like a soulless writing exercise.
*
Adoration — As in Dryad a lyrical ego once again finds himself in a wood, once again thinks about fellatio (this time in a Berlin club), and finally compares himself to a mushroom. Despite being an interesting piece to follow all the way through, as a reader one has to accept a lot of weird choices or clumsy phrasing and ultimately disregard the schematic approach to comparisons.
*
Evening Poem — combines the peaceful tone of a haiku and the down-to-earth dignity of Heaney. Not Hewitt’s most original, but one of his better pieces.
*
Tree of Jesse & Ta Prohm — The last poems of the collection centre around the death of the protagonist’s father. Premortal grief and lack of religion are their themes. Both poems seem to prepare for the grand finale, the eponymous poem.
*
Tongues of Fire — The very last poem might be regarded as the collection’s sole contender to be called a masterpiece. Thoughts surrounding the afterlife are brought forward in an artistic manner that is both worthwhile and graced by some sort of beauty.
*
Tongues of Fire is an interesting collection worthy of discussion with poems ranging from unconvincing to quite enjoyable and, at last, deeply personal and to some extent ponderous.

[Ada · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,8

[regulus 𓂃۶ৎ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Seán Hewitt really do be taking the spot as my favorite little leprechaun

[Francisca · Rating 5 out of 5]

starting the year with a read I already know will be in my best of the year list

[TonyR · Rating 5 out of 5]

No start date no finish date - just to pick it up from time to time reading bit and a bit more. Lovely and dark. Strange beautiful language combinations.

[C.L. McCartney · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was prompted to read this after finishing Hewitt's gorgeous memoir All Down Darkness Wide. The autobiographical detail gleaned from it really deepens your appreciation for the poetry (although I suppose strictly speaking, the poetry ought to stand alone), and his lyrical eye for a turn of phrase remains in clear evidence.

The first half of this collection, I would say, I really loved. It opens with verses that blend his early life in Liverpool, his sexuality and his faith. He makes strong use of natural imagery, and uses religious language to make the irreligious feel sacred. He then writes very movingly about his experiences when a partner, who fell into depression and was hospitalised. It is in this context that he retells elements of the Buile Suibhne (Suibhne's Frenzy - an Irish folktale), which is a fantastic endeavour. The poem in which Hewitt takes on the perspective of Suibhne's wife, begging to be allowed to join him in the wilds and to live with him in his madness, if only to be with him, was beautiful and heartbreaking in equal measure.

The back half of the collection, however, left me pretty cold. The focus returns to the natural world, in a way that doesn't feel particularly inspired (seeing too blooms next to each other: one about to blossom, the other already failing, prompts perfectly adequate observations about one relationship ending as another starts), and despite reading the collection whilst on holiday in some gorgeous English countryside, I found it extremely well expressed, but ultimately unengaging.

The religious imagery returns, becoming increasingly prominent, but with less impact. In one poem, he compares washing in a river to... bathing at Lourdes, which, almost felt like a non-metaphor (and indeed, that entire memory is far better explored in All Down). An extended poem about visiting a Berlin sex club and people shagging in a dark room, is described as if it were a church and people taking communion. It felt like it was reaching for profundity but instead managed to be a bit teenage. Then the poetry moved on to meditations on the poet's loss of his father; undoubtedly poignant for the author, but the thoughts contained within just failed to connect on some level. (But then again, I've not yet lost my father. I may return to these verses in later years and regret my thoughts here.)

A really talented writer and worth a read, but when I go back for another pass I'll probably skip the final third.