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Much have I travell’d in these woods of old: On Reading Seán Hewitt’s ‘Lantern’ At Night

I wanted to thank Andrew Macmillan, already a favourite poet for introducing me to these poems in his luscious tweets (never a bird sung so well) and Seán for his tweeted good wishes for the reading.  These were like a light in the dark night-time as they should be and the awful ponderous joke about Keats (” Much have I travell’d in these realms of gold” – get it 😦 ) in my title is meant to be a kind of witty homage to two poets – but like most non-poet’s play on words, it fell flat. Still this is about them not me.

Hewitt introduces us to his woods through a portal guarded by a dryad, but once there you experience a communion of day and night, summer and winter, the norms we live with and the delicious but not always comfortable queerings thereof. The poem (p. 5ff.), Dryad reminds me of another favourite (Macmillan’s Returning – Playtime p.60) in that the allegory is clear on the surface – an adjunct of being queer and the expressions of love this potentiated. These are sometimes to our own surprised disgust or at least discomfort,

… I remember the cold water

Spreading in the capillaries of my jeans.

But the meanings are queered by myriads of showers of seed that blend and complicate innocence and experience, death and life, inner and outer, night and day, worship and commonplace need:

 ….. , a way of bidding

The water to move, of taking in the mouth

The inner part of the world and coaxing it out.

Not just the aching leaf-buds

In spring, the cloud of pollen, or in autumn

The children knocking branches for the shower

Of seed, the people who kneel in the woods

At night. …          

These poems are of a rare beauty. Their rhythms move between that of Catholic liturgy, medieval lyric and something freer and more dangerous. Here is a poet obsessed as of old with the shackles of a beautiful tradition such that the shackles glisten as if they were loosening. I noticed lots of metalanguage about metre – feet in particular, which made me really think about how one should pronounce ‘medieval’ and even ‘yellowed’ (yellow-ed’) on p. 9.  But look at this luscious punning beauty – worthy of Pope (though Robin Robertson does it in The Long Take).

…, I go one foot after

The other, arriving on instinct

Between roots, dodging (p. 28)

Here the rhythmic life after the caesura after ‘other’ lives what the half-lines before plodded through.

And that same poem (Häksjön) contains a limpid version of the Narcissus myth. Just as elsewhere lie Daphne and Apollo, Tiresias (I think). So Irish – that mining of the Continental culture! You need not notice any of that (it might not even be there except in reflections and connections in my incoherent brain networks) but you still feel the beauty through the senses – those imagined and experienced. Even a poem that so obviously points to masturbation (Dormancy p. 17) is about touching the other, where death is nearly life without seeking the tired old associations (those ‘woods of old’ again) with fertility.

… . After seeing you

So sexless, unable, I sowed myself

Like a wych elm in a windless room.

Here the dead metaphor in ‘like’ regenerates the body in sexless worship.

Sorry Sean for presuming.

It is just to register my liking.

Steve