Missing the Eclipse by Joan Hewitt

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Joan Hewitt’s award winning poetry is subtle, deft, but always hits the spot. There is a sense here of the gaps in life, of words that frame the absences, the colouring around all that is missing, beautifully summed up in the title poem, but pervading the collection as it moves from Tyneside to Liverpool to Osterholz-Scharmbeck; from small domestic or intimate moments to understated, but none the less powerful, political observations. The language is sharp, layered with humour and intelligence.

The poems in Missing the Eclipse unfold like short stories told by moonlight.  Their subjects are the enduring puzzle of family, love and identity, set against seaside and city, Europe, near and far.  The recurring motif of the camera serves as reflexive eye, filter and captor, framing these ongoing moments that are evoked in language that is both sturdy and spare, unflinching.
Linda France
We all want to be told tales, and we want the voice telling us to be funny, passionate and often poignant, wise to the momentariness of joy and capable of conveying how stunned we are by loss. Missing the Eclipse does just that, and as a result is full of tenderness and estrangement: poetry for adults.
W.N.Herbert


Joan Hewitt‘s first collection Missing the Eclipse was published by Cinnamon Press in May 2008 . Raising three daughters on the North-east coast and a full-time post teaching English as a Foreign Language in Northumbria university meant that the book was assembled very slowly over fourteen years. Hewitt is looking forward to retirement at the end of 2010, which she partly envisages as a wooden table, white paper, a view of Tynemouth Victorian station, and time for the next book.

She loves giving readings and has performed twice at the Theatre Royal Newcastle, once with the Royal Shakespeare Company and with other regional poets . Venues include the universities of Newcastle, Northumbria and Teeside; north-east libraries, Newcastle’s Blue Room; Colpitt’s Poetry, Durham; Dilston Castle; and Costa Poetry Café in Liverpool.

Her work has appeared in anthologies and magazines, and she has been placed in five national competitions, three of which were also international: the Ledbury, Sussex and Kent Open, and Mslexia. In 2003, she received the Northern Promise Poetry Award from New Writing North ; and a Distinction in the MA in Writing Poetry from Newcastle university.

Two of her poems feature in The Body and the Book: Writings on Poetry and Sexuality: (Rodolpi Press, 2008: Amsterdam and New York).; and she has three in the Not a Muse world anthology of women poets (Holmes V. and Rogers K . eds. 2009:Haven Press: Hong Kong) , which features poets from 24 different countries, including luminaries Margaret Atwood, Sharon Olds, Erica Jong., and Pascale Petit. . In the preface, the poet, journalist, and short-story writer Laksi Pamuntjak refers to Hewitt’s poem Triangle in her discussion of the poetry of motherhood as a non-singular experience. She has a poem in 100 Island Poems of Great Britain and Ireland, (Iron Press) and admitted to great pleasure at the alphabetical accident of her name being under Heaney’s in the list of authors.

She is a member of the invited Northern Poetry Advanced Workshop, Chair Sean O’ Brien, (poet, dramatist , novelist and critic), which she appreciates for the uncompromising nature of its criticism, and for its support. Other members include WN Herbert, Colette Bryce, Jacob Polley and Kathy Towers.

For a radio interview for the Newcastle-based local radio stationNE1by poet Ellen Phethean and readings of poems from Missing the Eclipse go to: Northumbria University.