“In Dark-Land, Kevin Hart has crafted a personal narrative of searing beauty, a portrait of an extinct place and time and one boy's roiling development within it. This is not only a poet's Proustian grasping after memory, but a melodic assertion of selfhood and how that selfhood is forged within the contradictions of family and the pronouncements of faith. Put this beautiful book on your shelf between Frank Conroy's Stop-Time and Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life.”
—William Giraldi, author of The Hero's Body
“An athletics test, high school, suddenly enjoyable algebra, ticks, fruit bats, religion, poetry, family secrets—Hart is excellent at capturing his misty inner life and his many experiences and adventures adapting to a new environment . . . in this poignant memoir.”
—Kirkus Reviews
"This is a profoundly meditative book, philosophical in its sweep and magnificent in its phrasing, which encompasses rape and religion, Jewishness and Catholicism, and the darkness of those places where we grope for what truth the self may fumble towards.”
—Peter Craven, Australian cultural critic
“The memories that make their way into words here, emerging with startling clarity from the fog of forgetting, trace a highly unusual life journey from childhood into adolescence and beyond, and from working-class post-War London to steamy Brisbane in the sizzling ‘60s and ultimately to the USA. More than a memoir, Hart’s Dark-Land is also a sustained meditation on the enduring mysteries of mind and a compelling evocation of particular social milieux during a time of escalating if patchy geohistorical change. Lyrical, brooding, and at times hilariously funny, this is an utterly riveting read.”
—Kate Rigby, Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Environmental Humanities, University of Cologne, author of Meditations on Creation in an Era of Extinction
“Luminously detailed and lovingly told, Dark-Land is a memoir I will not soon forget. From the ‘divided life’ of his working-class childhood in London’s East End to his family’s immigration to sweltering Queensland, Kevin Hart tells of a boy who sees everything through a fog of unknowing, until a series of epiphanies opens the world to him. A major philosopher and theologian, Hart is also one of the finest poets now at work in English. In this remarkable coming-of-age, he writes, ‘Childhood ends, and then it ends again, and then it ends yet again.’ But as the story proves, it never does.”
—David Mason, author of Incarnation and Metamorphosis: Can Literature Change Us?
Praise for Kevin Hart's previous books:
"The most outstanding Australian poet of his generation. . . One of the major living poets in the English language. . . Kevin Hart is an erudite poet, but converts his learning into passion. He is a visionary of desire and its limits."
—Harold Bloom on Flame Tree
"When I read Kevin Hart, I feel less alone, which is to say that I feel that someone understands my own desire to be alone. I feel a companion spirit, out there wandering barefoot in the darkness, looking for God. But this does not mean that the experience is entirely comforting; this is not some faux-poetry of greeting-card consolation."
—Los Angeles Review of Books on Barefoot
“Kevin Hart’s Christianity is ever present even as he writes passionately of young love, titillation, and ‘thin girls who taste of Beaujolais at night.’ That he is comfortable with grief, mystery, solemnity, biblical and classical history, and humility instills his work with rare depth.”
―Foreword Reviews on Barefoot
"Pondus meum amor meus—my weight is my love, writes Augustine, as he describes how love carries him wherever it will. The 'wild track' of Kevin Hart’s new and selected poems seems akin to Augustine’s path; it is a collection deeply pondered, yet as lightly formed as a new leaf curved by wind. He writes of 'a name within a name' and of 'a darkness in the dark' while everywhere the reader finds the life inside the life. His is a poetry of the 'should have said'—clear-eyed thoughts set to music, speakable only when fear has vanished, set forth without nostalgia or regret.”
—Susan Stewart, Princeton University, on Wild Track
