Seán Hewitt, author of All Down Darkness Wide, on love, loss, and poetry

Send us Fan MailIn his new memoir All Down Darkness Wide, the award-wining poet, Sean Hewitt, describes that experience of living with the chronically depressed in prose that glints and shimmers with a poetic sensibility influenced in part by his literary hero, Gerard Manley Hopkins, a 19th century poet and Jesuit priest who, like Hewitt, struggled with his sexual orientation. For Hewitt that struggle meant learning at a young age how to play act convincingly. “I realized while I was writing the memoir just how prevalent the theme of lying was in my own life,” he has said. “Whether that was lying before I came out or continuing to lie in certain ways afterwards as a way of protecting myself or to create certain fictions. Writing a memoir seemed like the perfect antidote to that because it is a truth-telling exercise.” You could say that different kinds of truth-telling are represented in Hewitt’s two book choices for this show. One is Alice Oswald’s book-length eco-poem, Dart, which tells the story of an English river through the conversations of people who live and work on it. The other is The Land of Spices, a deeply autobiographical novel set in an Irish convent by the writer Kate O’Brien, a book that was banned at the time of its publication in 1941.