{"id":2475,"date":"2021-08-11T08:11:25","date_gmt":"2021-08-11T08:11:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2475"},"modified":"2021-09-01T07:04:36","modified_gmt":"2021-09-01T07:04:36","slug":"sean-hewitt-tongues-of-fire-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2475","title":{"rendered":"Se\u00e1n Hewitt, Tongues of Fire – review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tongues of Fire<\/em> is finely honed in expression, unsettled and unsettling in content. It combines intellectual analysis with extreme sensuous alertness. There are many fine short poems on wild nature, including a series on the mythical Irish outlaw Suibhne. Beyond these, Hewitt uses metaphors both Christian and pagan \u2013 sometimes in startling ways \u2013 to suggest an almost religious reverence for life\u2019s processes. However, such positive feelings have to maintain themselves against grief, pain and emotional conflict. Several poems deal with Hewitt\u2019s father\u2019s impending death by cancer. Others seem implicitly shadowed by it. Some explicitly present gay love and sexuality, and others seem to touch the same themes indirectly. All are bold and original in thought, feeling and expression. They draw these qualities from apparent personal experience, but their breadth and depth of resonance come from their familiarity with traditional forms and genres, which they remodel and combine in striking ways.<\/p>\n

One example is the relatively long \u2018Dryad\u2019. Framing personal memories in reminiscences of Ovidian myth, eighteenth century topographical poetry and Romantic nature worship, this recalls a period of furtive homoerotic encounters with strangers in a wood at night near the poet\u2019s old school, once with a man he thought might kill him. He remembers suddenly seeing the trees around him as being like a man he was fellating:<\/p>\n

Each was like a man with his head bent,
\neach watching and moving and making slow
\nlaboured sighs.<\/p>\n

He wonders whether such associations have ruined woods for him, but then asks what trees or plants themselves are, if not acts of kneeling to the earth. So, in a way that homophobia and sexual repression have made startling, he claims a place for homoerotic adventuring within the ancient idea of Eros as the fundamental life force of the universe. It\u2019s a stunning moment that seems to touch a vital nerve of existence in the way it combines compulsive attraction with terror.<\/p>\n

In \u2018Dryad\u2019, violent emotion is recalled in a reflective spirit. \u2018Tree of Jesse\u2019, in contrast, seems almost manic. The memory of a Portuguese baroque altarpiece showing Christ\u2019s genealogy as a tree, with Jesse at its root and the baby Jesus in Mary\u2019s arms at its crown, becomes an image for the poet\u2019s feelings about his father\u2019s approaching death. Short, powerfully propulsive lines whose endings cut against the grain of the syntax create the impression of a rollercoaster of sensations and ideas. The surreal picture of a tree with \u201ctwelve men \/ like gaudy fruits blooming\u201d on its branches becomes an image trembling between horror and exaltation:<\/p>\n

The body clasped at the root,
\nthe tree lifting its blood<\/p>\n

in ropes through the trunk, feeding,
\nand at the top the Christ-child
\nlike the sun ringed<\/p>\n

in hammered gold<\/p>\n

Hewitt tells us that the memory of that altarpiece came to haunt him as a representation he couldn\u2019t unsee of his father\u2019s living death:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 instead of Jesse,
\nit is you lying there \u2013 your body
\nproliferating upwards, being<\/p>\n

reconstituted, broken down
\ninto growth<\/p>\n

After saying what a privilege it felt to be living a life beyond himself in one of his father\u2019s dreams, Hewitt writes<\/p>\n

You are not leaving, I know,<\/p>\n

but shifting into image \u2013 my head
\nalready is haunted with you.
\nI have become a living afterlife.<\/p>\n

On one level that last line says that the dead live on in their descendants. However, it also carries the sense \u2013 typical of bereavement \u2013 that the poet himself feels unmade<\/em> by his father\u2019s approaching death.<\/p>\n

Hewitt wrestles again with the anguish of this death and what it means for his sense of God and the value and meaning of life in the last poem, \u2018Tongues of Fire\u2019. In this, the horns of a parasitic fungus destroying a stand of juniper trees are compared with both the tongues of fire that appeared when the Holy Spirit descended on the Apostles and the cancer destroying his father\u2019s lungs. There are no conclusions, only apprehensions, recognitions on the one hand of the inherence of destruction in life \u2013\u201cSome mute violence is budding \/ on all these shaking forms\u201d\u2013 and on the other resounding but uncertain declarations of hope:<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 this is when<\/p>\n

we make God, and speak in his voice.
\nCrying, again, amongst the shivering wild.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur life is a theophany\u201d \u2013 a visible manifestation of God \u2013 Hewitt declares, and the sense of passionate religious enquiry runs through his whole book, even where it\u2019s not explicit in a given poem. There\u2019s hardly a piece that isn\u2019t striking and rewarding on its own, but the way recurring archetypal images and thematic ideas fold into and ricochet off each other means that each individual poem means most when seen in dialogue with the others around it.<\/p>\n

Tongues of Fire<\/em> by Se\u00e1n Hewitt.\u00a0 Jonathan Cape. 80pp.; \u00a310.00.<\/p>\n

I would like to thank the Acumen editors Patricia Oxley and Danielle Hope for permission to post this review, which appeared in Acumen 100.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tongues of Fire is finely honed in expression, unsettled and unsettling in content. It combines intellectual analysis with extreme sensuous alertness. There are many fine short poems on wild nature, including a series on the mythical Irish outlaw Suibhne. Beyond these, Hewitt uses metaphors both Christian and pagan \u2013 sometimes in startling ways \u2013 to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[173],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sean-hewitt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2475"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2475"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2475\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2496,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2475\/revisions\/2496"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}