Seán Hewitt is a Leverhulme Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of English at Trinity College Dublin based in the Trinity Long Room Hub. He has recently finished revising his thesis, 'J.M. Synge, Modernism, and Political Protest', into a monograph, and is working on a new interdisciplinary project which explores creative engagements with the environment by writers from Gerard Manley Hopkins to Virginia Wolf. “All of them are either collecting bugs and beetles or marine life and studying plants and animals; I’m looking at how that filters through into their work”, says Seán.
Seán has now published his own body of work in the form of a pamphlet collection of poems called Lantern which, through evocative poems such as ‘Wild Garlic’, ‘Oak Glossary’ and ‘Leaf’, bring an almost spiritual focus to the natural world and the woodland environment.
Creative Influence
“There’s something that’s always stuck with me”, Seán explains referencing Seamus Heaney’s idea of writers having an ‘omphalos’ – the centre of one’s imaginative world. “For him, he describes it as the pump in his farmyard that makes the sound omphalos…omphalos, as it’s pumping; the word is also the Greek word for the navel of the world.” Seán describes his ‘omphalos’ as that of a wood close to where he went to school as a boy. “We all have that place that you feel you just go back to. The woodland has been that place for me.” Some of the poems are also set in Sweden where Seán lived during his PhD studies, and continue this connection with the nature while also revealing a level of personal anguish in poems such as ‘Kyrie’ and ‘Härskogen.’
This new pamphlet forms part of a bigger collection Seán is working on: “I’m working toward a book length collection and this takes one narrative out of it. It’s looking at a series of experiences through a relationship, going back to childhood and putting my body and experiences back into the natural world and dealing with the way we experience things through nature.” This youthful memory and physical awareness is thread through the descriptive and almost spiritual reverence for nature conveyed in the poems. “I think a lot of the poems come back repeatedly to one place as a way of rooting an experience that maybe happens over three or four years but there’s a connecting image that centres around something in the natural world.”
The case for nature poetry
Seán is aware of how the themes of his poetry might be perceived arguing that “nature poetry is expected in some way to answer to the rest of the world we live in.” He is cognisant that there may be a charge of ‘self-indulgence’ or ‘frivolousness’ in writing about things such as birds, and flowers and nature. “How do you make a case for nature poetry actually being something political and important?” he asks, adding “that connecting it to the body with those sort of memories coming through” is one way of addressing that. He also believes that if we can start to see the natural world as “something sacred”, then “perhaps we’ll be less inclined to destroy it.”
The title of the pamphlet collection Lantern takes its inspiration from a line in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem ‘The Lantern out of Doors’. “I think a lot of the imagery in the book contrasts the light against the darkness; there’s a poem about silver birch that has the line ‘for he is the light in a darkened wood.’” The collection ends with the poem ‘Wild Garlic’, an image of which is carried on the cover of the book by illustrator Claire Williams and the last line of which reads ‘The world is dark but the wood is full of stars.’
Lantern is published by Offord Road Books and will be launched in Dublin in Poetry Ireland on the 12th of March 2019. See here for more details.