HAUS FÜR POESIE

Two poetry collections published prior to his novel are the focus of this evening, Tongues of Fire (Jonathan Cape 2020) and Rapture’s Road (Jonathan Cape 2024). In these poems, mythopoetic connections between the self and nature emerge – a consoling, almost spiritual interconnectedness that holds and protects all that is transient, as well as the self within it: “Every time I go back, I see a part / of my life laid out, still growing in a field.” In “Dryad,” the speaker describes how, in the forest, under the watch of a tree nymph, he meets men for sex “in a dark chamber / of the wood, guarded, and made safe,” “and now / each woodland smells quietly of sex.” Hewitt’s poems harbor no mistrust of beautiful things; they open themselves to the world and its spirits, including the traces of literary ghosts such as Gerard Manley Hopkins or Thomas Hardy, in whose intellectual tradition Hewitt moves. Although – or precisely because – the poems often take their point of departure in a reverent stillness, in a careful listening into nature, its earth and its organs, they develop an almost immersive force and grace: “Hold your ear / to the ground: you can hear / the voices caught in the earth, chattering.”

All the poems presented at the event have been especially translated for Poesiefestival Berlin.

Seán Hewitt in conversation with Anna Julian Mendlik

The event will be held in English without interpretation.

Funded by: British Council, Culture Ireland