Seán Hewitt

Abstract

Seán Hewitt Seán Hewitt and Kelly Sullivan tongues of fire, Seán Hewitt’s debut collection published by Jonathan Cape, won the Laurel Prize for ecopoetry in 2021. His memoir, All Down Darkness Wide (Penguin USA) came out in 2022 and won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature that year. His second poetry collection, Rapture’s Road, will be published in 2024. He also published an academic monograph J. M. Synge: Nature, Politics, Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2021). Hewitt grew up in Warrington, England, and is assistant professor in literary practice at Trinity College Dublin. In 2023 he was elected to the Royal Society of Literature. ________ Kelly Sullivan spoke to Seán Hewitt via Zoom on 30 January 2023. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. KELLY SULLIVAN: Do you do you remember when you first read Heaney, and do you remember feeling any kind of connection to the poems—or was it just something you had to do for school? HEWITT: We first read Heaney as part of the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE). I think the poems were all from Death of a Naturalist—the big ones. The title poem, “Mid-Term Break” and “Digging” are the three I remember most clearly. What struck me about “Death of a Naturalist” was the earthiness of the language. Looking back, it seems as if it had an erotic—very sensuous— language. That struck me as different from the other poets we looked at who are quite plain spoken; Simon Armitage, Carol Anne Duffy, and Philip Larkin came from a different place with more obvious humor or plain speech. I liked the music of Heaney, but those other two poems, “Mid-Term Break” and “Digging,” are so present that they feel clichéd for me now. I know them so well that I kind of run away from them. But “Death of a Naturalist” still holds its [End Page 142] resonance—more elusive without that wrapped-up ending that the other two have. SULLIVAN: Did you, growing up in Britain, think of Heaney as an Irish poet or was he just another lyric poet when you first encountered him? HEWITT: I definitely thought of Heaney as an Irish poet. But I question that now because I wonder, was he presented to us in our anthology as a British poet? I remember there were four poets that we read, and he was the only one who wasn’t British. But he may have been presented to us as that in a four-nation sort of anthology: Gillian Clarke, a Welsh poet; Carol Anne Duffy, Scottish; Simon Armitage, English; and Seamus Heaney, northern Irish. So although I thought of him as Irish, I think he was presented as part of UK poetry. But, yes, I was aware of him as a northern Irish poet. SULLIVAN: Do you remember when you started to read Heaney’s work on your own or sought him out as a poet? HEWITT: It would probably have been in my second year of university that I first picked up his books. I used to shop in charity shops, never in bookstores, which meant that for a long time my poetry reading was in the classics like Tennyson or Wordsworth. Where I grew up there wasn’t that much contemporary poetry in the secondhand shops. On my shelf behind me I have my original copy of the New and Selected Poems, or is it the Selected Poems, Faber’s gray one? The Selected offers Heaney’s greatest hits, but the book I best remember finding in a charity shop was The Haw Lantern. What I loved was that I knew none of the poems before I opened it; they were all new to me. And I didn’t understand some because there were classical references that I wasn’t able to figure out. That’s when I realized there was a lot more to discover about Heaney. Finding The Haw Lantern was like, wow, okay. At that age, I would buy one book and spend a long time with it repeatedly trying to read the poems, something I think I do less of now...