Seán Hewitt & Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe

Tickets for this event will go on sale by phone only 02752788 on Tuesday 6 July at 12 noon and will be sold in pods of 2 tickets. Capacity for this event is very limited and further instructions regarding Covid-19 compliance will be sent to ticketholders. Attendance is for ticketholders only. This event will take place outdoors and socially distant seating will be provided.

In his debut collection, Tongues of Fire, Seán Hewitt gives us poems of a rare musicality and grace. By turns searing and meditative, these are lyrics concerned with the matter of the world, its physicality, but also attuned to the proximity of each moment, each thing, to the spiritual. Here, there is sex, grief, and loss, but also a committed dedication to life, hope and renewal. Drawing on the religious, the sacred and the profane, this is a collection in which men meet in the woods, where matter is corrupted and remade. There are prayers, hymns, vespers, incantations, and longer poems which attempt to propel themselves towards the transcendent. In this book, there is always the sense of fragility allied with strength, a violence harnessed and unleashed. The collection ends with a series of elegies for the poet’s father: in the face of despair, we are met with a fierce brightness, and a reclamation of the spiritual. ‘This is when / we make God, and speak in his voice.’ Paying close attention to altered states and the consolations and strangeness of the natural world, this is the first book from a major poet.

“An inspirational, uplifting and assured debut collection, reflecting on nature and mortality.” The Guardian

Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe’s spellbinding debut collection of poetry, Auguries of a Minor God, explores love and the wounds it makes. Its first half is composed of five sections, corresponding  to the five arrows of Kama, the Hindu God of Love, Desire and Memory. From ‘stunning’ and ‘paralysing’ to ‘killing’ and ‘destroying’, each arrow has its own effect on some body — a very real, contemporary body — and its particular journey of love. The second half is a long narrative poem, ‘A is for [Arabs]’, which follows a different kind of journey: a family of refugees who have fled to the West from conflict in an unspecified Middle Eastern country. With an extraordinary structure, yoking abecedarian and Fibonacci sequences, it is a skilful and intimate account of migration and exile, of home and belonging. Auguries of a Minor God heralds the arrival of a virtuosic and compassionate new voice.

“Eipe is an ardent soul. Her work is youthful and wise, signalling a profound interest in destruction, stillness, healing, joy.” Anne Enright