Here's an exclusive sneak preview from Seán Hewitt's powerful write up in the PBS Summer Bulletin:
"I have two poetic fascinations: a poetry of the body, which is an inheritance from queer writers, and a poetry of the natural world seen slant. In Tongues of Fire, I hope, these two things come together, and are rarely distinct.
The book is in four parts. The fourth section was written last. My father died on the day I signed the contract for Tongues of Fire, and those final poems deal with all the world-tilting confusion of losing a parent, and try to map the strangeness of the world as it appeared to me in those months. They are, in a sense, pre-elegies; they are also poems that I wish I never had the occasion to write.
But I hope that readers might find here the consolation of commonality. They might see an altered perspective; or might recognise, in the words of the final poem, “love’s fragility, its immanence // in the body, the proximity it takes / to material form.”
PBS Members can read this full interview with Seán Hewitt in the Summer Bulletin and order copies of Tongues of Fire here with 25% PBS Member discount.