Wild
and deep as the forests they explore, Seán 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 understood: ‘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 prayer: 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.