Seán Street Candlelight 15 July 2026. 37 pp. ISBN 978-3-901993-88-6 (= PSPS 42) £9.00 (+ 4.00 p&p), €9.00 (+ 4.00 p&p), US$ 12.00 (+ 6.00 p&p)   "Seán Street excels in capturing the significance of the fleeting moment, when, for instance 'the fir tree scuffles with pigeons'. He has, after a life's work in radio, and a lifelong love of music, a remarkable sensitivity to sound - silence, too - reflected in the subtle echoes of rhyme, of rhythm. Elegies for poets and artists honour their work and, movingly, his relationships with them. In Candlelight Seán Street explores the dark predicaments of mortality, the solace of creativity, and the joy of being alive." Julian May "Candlelight is the shadow play at the end of a day you'll never forget, a view through a woodland that opens onto eternity. Here are poems well-made enough to handle: objects cut by hand, smooth as river stones, cast to a skilful tune. Amidst these thirty-one elegies for the good ones lost, in a darkening world, come epiphanies of brightness. From parkland to riverside, Liverpool to Paris, join the candlelit table in conversation with Hart Crane and Yeats, with local legends and future days, in poems that draw you into the heart of lived conversation: 'is not the day yet young?'" Chris McCabe "The fragility of life and of the world we've created wind through this highly accomplished, quiet, yet deeply affective pamphlet. Liminal spaces and sound are central to the metaphors and lyric stories, poems hanging 'on space / between things / happening', a candle lit in memory in Sacre-Coeur, its flame, like the deceased, 'escaping [...] the prison of shape', a single musical note held for 12 seconds that segues into eternity. The images ring with truth and are not afraid of nostalgia, the sense of homecoming tinged with melancholy, but not with pessimism. In the end it's Spring and new life that holds sway in this elegantly written pamphlet." Jan Fortune

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Table of Contents

Excerpts from Candlelight

Newsham Park, Evening

A narrow
still moment,
air before
the air knows
itself, faint
whispers round
the bandstand
and the lake,
places where
an almost
poem can
hang on space
between things
happening,
existing
but not yet
ready to
be written
or spoken.
 

On Hearing That Benjamin Zephaniah Had Died
7. 12. 2023

Because they told me in the neutral grey
of an ordinary day when the sun
neither shone nor set, when the rain could do
no more than drizzle, when all I was doing
was something forgotten, I remember the moment.

Nothing rolled on a drum, no thunder clapped, nothing
prepared me, let me tense muscles against the punch.

And because I had no one to tell
I told myself they must be mistaken,
(that happens you know - urban myths,
misheard rumours - it happens.)

But as minutes he was torn from ticked on
through the unshockable unstoppable clock
time told me to tell me it was true after all.

And because it has to be true,
the gathering dust moment -
nothing and normal till then -
freezes forever, and because there is
less of me now, there is more of him
here in what’s left, alive everywhere
always in black and white.
 

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