In this remarkable second collection, Sean 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

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.

About the Author
Sean Hewitt was born in 1990. He is the author of the poetry collection Tongues of Fire, which received the Laurel Prize and was shortlisted for many awards, including the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. His memoir, All Down Darkness Wide, was shortlisted for Biography of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards and for the Foyles Non-Fiction Book of the Year, and longlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize and the Polari Book Prize. Hewitt lectures at Trinity College Dublin, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2022, he was awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.

Reviews
A poet unafraid of the simply gorgeous... The undaunted vitality of these poems points to a bright future for Irish poetry * Sunday Times *
Stunning... Shot through with yearning and sacred imagery... Hewitt's poetry is a hide and seek of the self. It reveals and conceals * Observer *
Hewitt's words indubitably penetrate, with Nerudian passion and force * Guardian *
An exquisitely calm and insightful lyric poet, reverential in nature and gorgeously wise in the field of human drama -- Max Porter, author of Shy
Rapture's Road is that rare thing when it comes to second collections. Something which takes his debut Tongues of Fire's natural elements and post-modern Romantic themes and fashions them into something wholly unique. Rapture's Road is political without being hectoring, mystical without being detached, and wholly in hoc to a natural world in all its chaos, beauty, creativity and destruction * RTE *



Book Information
ISBN 9781787334274
Author Sean Hewitt
Format Paperback
Page Count 80
Imprint Jonathan Cape Ltd
Publisher Vintage Publishing
Weight(grams) 100g
Dimensions(mm) 196mm * 130mm * 12mm