A review by fjcookie
Tongues of Fire by Seán Hewitt

4.5

good god this is amazing

'leaf'

• "For how each leaf traps light as it falls.// For even in the nighttime of life/ it is worth living, just to hold it"

'Dryad'- GAY!

• "I wonder if I have ruined/ these places for myself, if I have brought/ each secret to them and weighed the trees// with things I can no longer bear"
• "what is a tree, or a plant, if not an act/ of kneeling to the earth"

'kyrie'

• 'I have found myself at a place/ so close to life, to its truth of violence"
• 'what is a print to a child but a god// who we turn to when we still believe/ that everything is fixable'
• 'the places where words extinguish/ themselves and leave all the things/ that cannot be fixed or forgotten.'

'St John's Wort'

• 'Bearing no gift, I took your head/ in my empty hands like a world and held it.'

'Wild Garlic'

• 'the world is dark/ but the wood is full of stars.'

'Evening Poem'

• 'the garden is re-assembling,/ calling its sparrows home'
• 'I am teaching myself again to bear it'

'moor'

• 'speaks rain and sudden light'
• 'wants every night to reach up/ and swallow the moon, swallow something// is a mouth'

'Ilex'

• 'may the people approach one by one/ to witness how a fragile thing is raised.'

'Epithalamium'

• 'I did not// realise how far I had walked you/ into my life, until your hand let go.'

'Petition'

• 'Are we all/ just wanting to see ourselves/ changed, made unearthly?'
• 'I came here to see myself shattered/ and remade, if only to show myself/ that it is possible'

'Tree of Jesse'

• 'its ebbing shape, slivering out/ and then sliding back into its bright/ circle, its restless life.'
• 'Those who we love, and who die, become gods to us.'
• 'I felt in that moment/ the privilege of being alive/ in your mind, to have been remade// beyond myself and beamed out'
• 'You are not leaving, I know,// but shifting into image- my head/ already is haunted with you.'

'tongues of fire'

• 'where// he has chosen to speak,/ or where I have chosen to hear him speaking,/ where I have conjured meaning// when I have needed'