Lantern, Seán Hewitt

Offord Road Books, 2019   £6.00/€7.00

The Light of the World

Both praise-song and prayer, Lantern shines its lyric grace on nature and faith. Hewitt explores grief and desire in woodland settings, where ‘each tree is an altar to time […] each leaf traps light as it falls’ (‘Leaf’).

Fir trees offer consolation after a hospital visit, with their ‘quiet circles’ and ‘endless stretching upward’ (‘Härskogen’), and a birch becomes the object of veneration in a lovely version of Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno:

for he is the light in a darkened wood
for in his way he is the maker of heaven and earth […]
for his flowers are winged
    [‘And I will lay down a votive to my silver birch’]

‘Dryad’ transmutes tree to human. The ‘woman carved from the bole of an oak’ guards a wood where the speaker retreats with a lover, and where ‘each tree stood over me / in perfect symmetry with his body.’ He fears burdening the woodland with secrets, but concludes

what is a tree, or a plant, if not an act
of kneeling to the earth, a way of bidding

the water to move, of taking in the mouth
the inner part of the world and coaxing it out.

The vascular tissues of plants are named in ‘Oak Glossary,’ where ‘god is felt in the phloem and xylem / as a deep echo of water.’

In other poems, encounters with water suggest resurrection. ‘Petition’ recalls a submersion in holy water at Lourdes, and observes night-fishermen and interlocking trees, all ‘trying to bring some life / up to the surface, unharmed.’ in ‘Häcksjön’ the speaker, leaping into the lake, ’plumb(s) its dark core, and then its arms / rush in and lift [him] back to the light.’

Hewitt’s themes of nature and faith are allied to those of Gerard Manley Hopkins, about whom he has written elsewhere. Hopkins, in ‘The Lantern Out of Doors,’ observes the beauty of men who pass by with their ‘wading light,’ but he cannot follow them.

Hewitt’s Lantern illuminates a more compassionate and inclusive spirituality and sexuality: ‘The world is dark / but the wood is full of stars’ (‘Wild Garlic’).

Fiona Larkin