Kevin Hart was born in 1954 in the village of Ockenden near London, and grew up in London and Brisbane. He has published several books of poetry in Britain, Australia and America, including Flame Tree: Selected Poems (2002) and Young Rain (2009) from Bloodaxe. His award-winning poetry has been translated into several languages, including Chinese. He is also the author of several volumes of literary criticism and theology. He teaches in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. His latest poetry collections, Morning Knowledge (2011) and Barefoot (2018), are published by University of Notre Dame Press.
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.... With Young Rain Kevin Hart
continues his “transmemberment of song” into a realm all his own in
Australian poetry.
*Harold Bloom*
Kevin Hart is one of the finest poets writing in English today. I
admire his erudition and his imagination, the way history, art,
myth, literature and many things come together in his poetry. This
book will be a feast for those who want poetry to be both
metaphysics and song. An absolutely original and indispensable
poet.
*Charles Simic*
Kevin Hart is one of the most sophisticated poets writing today,
though the poems in Young Rain are disarmingly straightforward.
They have an ease and lucidity that makes them seem almost casual,
so that it is with a feeling of surprise that you realise that you
have been drawn into a conversation of the utmost gravity
concerning the private reaches of the self, darkness and death, as
in the powerful sequences Night Music and Dark Retreat. There is
nothing oppressive about them though, and the limpid rigor of the
intellect they embody is leavened by the tenderness and sensuality
of the poems in another sequence, Amo te Solo, which possess a
lustiness that would seem at home in the Bible, but has almost
disappeared from contemporary poetry
*John Koethe*
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