Overview

"""A granular, meditative, and beautiful portrait of a fascinating life."" --Booklist""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 BodyThis powerful memoir from poet Kevin Hart traces his difficult childhood as a ""backward boy"" in a poor part of London, a disorienting move to tropical Australia, and the secrets he and his family kept from one another.Dark-Land: Memoir of a Secret Childhood is Kevin Hart's searing, yet at times hilarious, narrative of his first thirteen years. It is a story of survival and transformation, of deception and recovery, and it passes from a frightening childhood in the East-End of London to a new and bewildering life in sub-tropical Australia. Throughout, Hart draws on John Bunyan's evocation of ""Dark-Land"" in Pilgrim's Progress, the place Valiant-for-Truth leaves in order to seek the Celestial City. But Dark-Land is no allegory. We see Hart's hidden inner life, his family's penchant for keeping secrets, and their illusions about the nature of their shared past. We see Hart grow from being the despair of his teachers in a rough primary school to experiencing a ""conversion"" in a math class in Brisbane, Australia, which turned him into a Christian, a poet, and an academic.Written in elegant, lucid prose, without a trace of sentimentality, Dark-Land is a memoir of a working-class childhood, a narrative of a migrant, and the story of a convert to Christianity."

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9781589881891

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Reviews

"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"

Author Information

Kevin Hart is the author of eleven poetry collections including Wild Track: New and Selected Poems and Barefoot. His most recent books are Lands of Likeness: For a Poetics of Contemplation, which represents his Gifford Lectures for 2019-2023, and Contemplation: The Movements of the Soul. He is the Jo Rae Wright University Professor in the School of Divinity, at Duke University, and lives with his wife and son in Durham, NC.

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