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In a 1985 interview with fellow poet John Kinsella, Kevin Hart reflected on the nature of poetry: "People sometimes think that the spiritual world is distinct from, even distant from, this world. . . . But the spiritual world is within this one: not as a secret, but as a radiance. . . . We find it through God's grace and our attention. Poetry is one form of attention, and poetry does not lead us to another world: it shows us this world, this relationship, this chair, this ivy on the outside wall." In Young Rain, Hart continues his exploration of the mysterious radiance within this world.
“Two poets within recent memory who tried to deal with the Christian world—poets who agonized over their faith, not just made mention of the doctrines—are Anne Sexton and Jane Kenyon. Kevin Hart joins their ranks in writing poems informed by a serious questioning of his beliefs. Many of the poems in this collection deal with temptation and the complexity of living in a world fraught with poles of positive and negative, good and bad, sin and redemption.” —Rain Taxi
“. . . Hart’s latest volume . . . reveal[s] . . . a poet capable of articulating genuine feeling and emotional insight in musical poems of marked gravitas and considerable philosophical depth.” —TLS
“Kevin Hart is one of he 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
“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
“Elegant, deeply philosophical . . . Kevin Hart is the best Australian poet of the past 25 years.” —Mark Strand
Kevin Hart is Edwin B. Kyle professor of Christian Studies at the University of Virginia. The author of seven volumes of poetry, he is also the author or editor of a number of scholarly books, including Counter-Experiences: Reading Jean-Luc Marion (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007).