Hewitt

Seán Hewitt made his name with an arresting debut collection, Tongues of Fire, and an unforgettable memoir, All Down Darkness Wide, an account of his life as a young gay man and a moving exploration of his relationship with a depressed partner, a book that doubled as a homage to Gerard Manley Hopkins. In the memoir, he described himself, at one point, as a ghost looking on to his own life. Rapture’s Road, his stunning second poetry selection, is a continuation of that haunting and Hopkins’s influence is again present,…

Actor Jennifer Love Hewitt, who is known for her work in films, including I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997), Can’t Hardly Wait (1998) and The Tuxedo (2002) among others, spoke about how she was sexualised as a teenager and the difficulties of ageing in Hollywood. Finding fame at such a young age came with its difficulties, and she opened up about her feelings while speaking on a podcast. “I felt watched. I felt like I had to be everything for everybody all the time. I was called sexy before I ever knew…

vRachel Hewitt is not, by her own assertion, great at “technical descents”; those stretches of trail run where solid ground is a distant dream. Here the runner must yield to gravity while simultaneously navigating boulders and scree, often having already climbed great heights over a huge distance, grappling with weather and carrying a pack laden with water, energy bars, spare kit and incontinence pads. To those of us more at home in the great indoors, the mere fact that she is anywhere approaching upright seems…

The poet Seán Hewitt’s first foray into memoir unfolds in the nonlinear way favoured by many contemporary exponents of the form. We move with elegant fluidity between phases of Hewitt’s life: recollections of growing up near Liverpool with a developing sense of his queerness; his complex and furtive sexual experiences at university; the development of his literary interests; the illness and devastating death of his father.At the core of the book, however, is the writer’s relationship with the inscrutable Elias. Elias is a…

This extraordinary memoir by the poet Seán Hewitt suggested itself after he had made a brutally impersonal discovery. While trawling the internet, he stumbled, in a moment of casual curiosity, upon something he had not known – that a young man with whom he had been romantically involved at Cambridge had died before his time (there is a non-invasive sensitivity about Hewitt’s decision to leave the reader to guess at what must have happened). He remembers “Jack” (the names in the book have been changed) with warmth and in…