Strange Light

From award-winning poet Seán Hewitt, writer of the critically acclaimed All Down Darkness Wide and Open, Heaven, comes a remarkable collection of poems that illuminate the gaps between love and its loss, familiarity and estrangement, happiness and grief.

In Strange Light, Seán Hewitt conjures a world on the border of the physical and the spiritual, a world where men meet in the woods at night, 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. In this world there is sex, grief, and loss, but also a committed dedication to life, hope and renewal. There are elegies for the poet’s father and paeans to the relationship between queer sexuality and the natural world, vespers and hymns, even a few works that attempt to propel themselves into transcendence.

By turns reverent and profane, beautiful and terrifying, to read Strange Light is to fall into its trance, a deep delirium of hypnotic rapture where everything is called into question, where fragility is allied with strength, and violence is both harnessed and unleashed. Hewitt has delivered a singular collection of poetry that leads us through the darkness—from the deep woods of forbidden love and illicit secrets—into a clearing of tenderness and reawakening.