Carrying Bodies Delicate and Terrible
Review of Seán Hewitt’s Lantern (UK: Offord Road Books, 2019) and Aidan Forster’s Exit Pastoral (USA: YesYes Books, 2019)
By Jack Xi
The first time I read Seán Hewitt’s Lantern, I was balled into a fuzzy blue jacket in an office. A storm and the freezing air-conditioning had misted the windows, turning the swaying trees outside to green smears. My hands were paling and going the way of ice. In other words, the atmosphere was perfect for reading the book.
Hewitt’s debut pamphlet draws on its author’s life—born in Warrington, based in Cork, Ireland—to meditate on a variety of themes such as nature, religion, and pain. To do so, his speaker switches between crystalline meditations on the natural world and emotionally charged narratives. The collection’s overall tone is haiku-like in its granularity and clarity, as well as its gentle mournfulness. For instance, its opening poem, “Leaf,” expresses a dual awareness of life and death, describing how “each tree is an altar to time” and how woods “are forms of grief grown from the earth.” As the phrase “grief grown” suggests, its speaker holds an awareness of nature’s beauty together with a recognition of life’s fragility.
This sense of fragility and death is carried into other poems and countered by a fascination with the endurance of living things. In “Petition,” for example, the speaker’s grief over an unnamed illness is allayed by the life around them. Recalling a religious pilgrimage to the Lourdes sanctuary, they reflect on how they have come to stand by a pond in the rain “to see [themselves] shattered/ and remade”; to see a chance at recovery after their past religious experience failed to provide one. Leaving the pond, they notice how everything, from the trees to the night-fishermen, is “trying to bring some life/ up to the surface, unharmed.” The speaker finds a measure of peace in the cycles of life and death in the wild, where nature struggles alongside humankind.
The beauty that Hewitt’s speaker finds in nature borders on the religious. Several poems in Lantern offer nature as an alternative to religion, a more forgiving refuge for the soul. Where “Petition” prays to a pond, the poem “And I will lay down a votive to my silver birch” worships a tree:
for through him I am granted intercession
for he speaks on my behalf
for his knots are holy fonts
for I can bless myself by him
for he does not observe liturgical time…
A loving echo of the comico-religious poem Jubilate Agno, Hewitt’s poetic offering queers the birch while praising it. While gendering the birch as masculine, the speaker describes the tree as able to “pass as a woman” with skin that is often “pink.” In opposition to typical visions of Christ, the birch is a messiah who rejects the structures of church calendars and gendered norms. His miracles are not lofty, but simple, involving the “improve[ment] of soil quality.” The birch is thus transformed through the speaker’s awe into a queer but natural messiah.
Nature in Lantern does not exist solely for human solace. The poem “Moor” personifies its titular landscape as a cruel creature that, having killed someone, “hides and is never caught.” At the end of the poem, an unnamed farmer repeatedly calls the name of the victim, his despair amusing to the moor, who “sits in the dark quietly and smiles.” Hewitt forces the reader to remember that nature is its own entity with its own unique—and sometimes murderous—priorities. Poems like these end with unresolved tension, adding to a wider cycle of grief and healing.
Structurally speaking, Hewitt develops Lantern’s themes by interspersing its more emotional pieces exploring instances of grief and pain with more meditative and atmospheric poems. Ideas are introduced and then built upon in later poems. This large-scale repetition does however wear thin when the collection returns to where it began thematically. The closing lines of the first and last poems—“even in the nighttime of life/ it is worth living, just hold it” (from “Leaf”) and “The world is dark/ but the wood is full of stars” (from “Wild Garlic”)—share similar sentiments and rely on the same metaphor of light and dark. Though every poem in this collection carries a spate of new images and ideas, I was unconvinced that the core idea of the bookend poems—that life offers joys amid the pain—was developed enough for me to be satisfied with a return to the start.
I was also left cold by Lantern’s tendency to remain ambiguous. Hewitt’s speakers operate mostly on the peripheries of relationships and society, reflecting on the emotional impact of others in solitude. Although this sense of isolation enhances the meditative mood of the book, it also creates obscurity and encourages solipsism. For instance, the poem “Dormancy” is coy about why its speaker is visiting a loved one in a hospital ward, making it more difficult to understand the narrative and the grief over the loved one's "sexless[ness].” As a queer person suffering from mental illness and chronic disability, I do relate to the collection's search for a way to be rid of pain or to bear with it, but I also wish for more detail to fill in some of its murkier poems.
Unlike Lantern, Aidan Forster’s Exit Pastoral does not offer escape or relief; it is instead a portrait of conflict. The differences in Forster’s and Hewitt’s chapbooks are perhaps most clearly illuminated by what they are willing to examine. In Forster’s poem, “On Stag,” Forster’s speaker recounts how his grandfather shot and killed a stag, and how that act caused him to “unlearn” his boyhood. The dead stag becomes a metaphor for the speaker’s youth, and the speaker does not shy away from describing the act of gutting and preparing meat (“He guided my hand/ through the sinew… peeled skin from the stag”). He wrestles with his conflicted feelings about the death, forcing down his mourning for the animal for fear of being labelled as weak. Where Hewitt’s speaker is soothed by nature, Forster’s speakers move through beautiful landscapes damaged by pain.
In an interview for Adroit Journal, Forster described the speakers of his collection as “boys [...] very much locked in the victimhood of their desire.” That is true. Queerphobia and gender norms seek to eradicate the boys’ desire even as the landscape blooms. They are crushed by the unhealthy forms of intimacy they long for. Growing up too quickly, they are alienated from their boyhood and their bodies.
In a collection focused on labeling desire as natural or unnatural, Forster’s use of the natural world must be attended to. The poem “Dear Field” is a strong representative example. Its speaker recalls how his family educated him on gender roles. His grandfather teaches that “a boy/ in a prairie dress” is equivalent to “grass”—fodder to be stepped on. His mother presents him with a “portrait/ of a girl dressed in farm tools”—an image of the rural woman given limited access to masculine presentation through the stereotypically masculine domain of agricultural labor. Together, the three of them attempt to build a barn and fail to complete it when “the wood [runs] out.” By the end of the poem, the speaker finds his body a place he “visited/ but did not belong to”—a “bright green clearing/ with a boy in its center, unable/ to touch his own skin.” As opposed to being a thing in and for itself (as in Hewitt’s Lantern), the natural world in Exit Pastoral largely serves to hold up a mirror to the pains and contradictions that populate its inhabitants’ lives. Like the rickety barn in “Dear Field,” human paradigms like gender are inexact and alienating attempts to tame wildness. These impositions of meaning on nature are paralleled to social impositions on human desire, restricting what a body is allowed to do.
Even in moments when the speakers can act on their desires, the result is still pain. Exit Pastoral opens with the poem “Ode to Boyhood,” whose title suggests a departure from innocence. The speaker describes once feeling confident enough about his body to show it off. Having made love to older men in places such as “the rim of a forest,” he now calls those cruising grounds “places of ruin,” hinting at a darker side to the intimacy. Written entirely in the past tense, the poem demonstrates that the speaker’s ease with that form of intimacy has been left behind. Other poems in the collection, such as “Field Notes on Rough Trade” and “Lure,” elaborate upon the trauma that a loveless roulette of sexual encounters imposes on their speakers. The intimacy the speakers experience is rendered hollow, as “Field Notes” shows:
All this to say I knew nothing but this sad skin—
Or, in the small space after one man finishes,
Another can begin—a window unlocked after a storm—
Where is thaw? & who will hold me when it comes?
As incisive and beautiful as Exit Pastoral is, certain poems betray an ableist slant. The poems about the poet’s autistic brother appear to portray autism as a tragedy or “disease” that happens to someone, rather than accepting that such a disability forms an integral part of that person’s identity and does not detract from their worth. In an early poem called “Brother,” a speaker recounts a dream in which his brother did not swallow the “bright bloom” of disease. The speaker of “Sausalito” bemoans his brother’s inability to clearly express his thoughts, since he imagined that his brother’s unstated disease “had no name [in Sausalito].” He then describes his brother’s action (“waving his hands like seabirds”) as a vexing lack of good fortune. These poems, unwittingly or not, seem to lean into the medical model of disability, wherein disabled bodies are marked disparagingly as diseased or defective.
In any case, Exit Pastoral renders queer discomfort vividly in language both tart and aphoristic. The chapbook is structured by a progression towards heavier feelings, a slow unveiling and elaboration on pain. Exit Pastoral reads like a sad love letter to youthful recklessness, written when the author has come to the end of the road and gotten out of his car. The collection’s search for a painless desire ends enigmatically and artfully in its closing poem, “Florida Sad Boys.” Here, the bodies of the speaker and his lover are recast as salmon, “learn[ing] & unlearn[ing]” the trials of fresh and saltwater, finding rest as night falls upon them. Whether this is a happy ending is up to the reader to decide.
Exit Pastoral is characterized by discontent, true peace seemingly unreachable for its speakers. Lantern almost reads as a loving response to it, with a promise that coping and regeneration are possible. When placed together, Hewitt appears to promise that intimacy is as natural as trees taking in moisture; something we should not blame ourselves for. This freedom, however, is only glimpsed in the hungry hopes offered by Forster. Ultimately, these works agree that nature and its tenacity can create a space for dreams. A space where one can admit desire, wince at old wounds, and perhaps, eventually, come to terms with oneself.
Jack Xi (he/they) is a queer Singaporean poet. A member of the writing collective /Stop@BadEndRhymes (stylized /s@ber), they can be found on wordpress under “jackxisg.wordpress.com”. Jack’s been published in OF ZOOS, Wyvern Lit, Perverse, and several Singaporean anthologies.