Rapture's Road

In this remarkable second collection, Seán Hewitt describes a journey haunted by love, loss and estrangement — from one of the Sunday Times 30 under 30 in Ireland.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE

In this remarkable second collection, Seán Hewitt describes a journey haunted by love, loss and estrangement — from one of the Sunday Times 30 under 30 in Ireland.

'Points to a bright future for Irish poetry' — SUNDAY TIMES

'An exquisitely calm and insightful lyric poet' — MAX PORTER

'Amazing writing of breathtaking power' — IRVINE WELSH

As the mind wanders and becomes spectral, these poems forge their own unique path through the landscape. The road Hewitt takes us on is a sleepwalk into the nightwoods, a dream-state where nature is by turns regenerated and broken, and where the split self of the speaker is interrupted by a series of ghosts, memories and encounters.

Following the reciprocal relationship between queer sexuality and the natural world that he explored in Tongues of Fire, the poet conjures us here into a trance—a deep delirium of hypnotic, hectic rapture where everything is called into question, until a union is finally achieved—a union in nature, with nature.

A threnody for what is lost, a dance of apocalypse and rebirth, Rapture's Road draws us through what is hidden, secret, often forbidden, to a state of ecstasy. It leads into the humid night, through lethal love and grief, and glimpses, at the end of the journey, a place of tenderness and reawakening.