... a rapturous account of his years with a boyfriend who suffered from suicidal depression ... Woven into this portrait of depression’s maelstrom is the author’s own queer coming-of-age. Of his abandoned Catholicism, Hewitt confesses that 'the shape of myself was molded by it, the routines of my body colored by its sounds and movements, the imagery of my mind rinsed with it,' and to our benefit; even his depictions of cruising have a holy aura. As a dedicated nonfiction writer, I sometimes meet poets’ memoirs with a caginess that is utterly disgraced by a book like this, whose structure is nearly as immaculate as its sentences. Near the book’s end, the lovers collaborate on a poetic translation and work to 'piece together a voice in the space between us.' Writing is always an act of translation, and Hewitt beautifully illuminates his own darknesses so that we might also see our own.
The contradictions of Seán Hewitt’s memoir are no less intense, but less readily apparent...The author of a 2020 poetry collection, Tongues of Fire, and of an academic study of the Irish playwright J. M. Synge, Hewitt would not seem at first glance to be someone in peril...But his thoughtful and often exquisitely written memoir is both a gay coming-of-age and an exploration of the mental health crises affecting the LGBTQ community...More specifically, it is the story of his long-term partner Elias’s suicidal depression, of the toll this illness took on Hewitt, and of the revelations that it spurred...The dramas in this book, like the sentences, are less pyrotechnic than those of Asturias or Kochai, but they lack neither energy nor significance...The memoir at its core is about Hewitt’s relationship with Elias, starting with their meeting in Colombia, where both men are traveling alone...Elias is Swedish, and once Hewitt returns to the United Kingdom, their relationship seems destined to be long-distance, until they move in together: first in Liverpool, where Hewitt pursues a graduate degree, and subsequently in Gothenburg...Though a study of despair, the memoir is not despairing: through their poetry, Hopkins and Boye offer inspiration to Hewitt, also a poet...Considering queer lives, 'both of them hoped—one with certainty, one with longing—that there would be a place for those people, a friend to watch them, a room with their name above the lintel.'
Hewitt’s book is excellent ... Hewitt’s prose illustrates his grounding in poetry. There is such a casual beauty to his images and metaphors that this reads less like words on a page and closer to torrents of water washing over you. This is not the spare, sparse prose of Hewitt’s novelist contemporaries, but is a robust and mellifluous text that feels joyous to read ... These days seemingly everyone has a memoir of some description — tweeters, former Love Islanders, fictional characters — so I’ve found it can be productive to ask two questions of each new offering: why does this exist, and why should I care? Hewitt convincingly answers both questions, as his book is an important addition to the heartbreak genre that offers a modern perspective now surprisingly rarely seen — that of a man. It is refreshing to be presented with a book that explores heartbreak and meditates on the meaning of relationships with such emotional openness and vulnerability from a male perspective ... In Tongues of Fire Hewitt proved himself to be one of Ireland’s foremost poets. In All Down Darkness Wide he shows himself to be one of our foremost memoirists too. A stunning meditation on love and heartbreak, this feels like an essential work of the new Irish queer canon. Let us hope it is but a first volume, the beginning of a vast work.
