Professional Writing - Recent Work

The Heart of the Poet - Breakpoint, Jan 2006

Internationally renowned critics Charles Simic and Harold Bloom have described Kevin Hart as one of the most significant poets writing in English today. Bloom has gone so far as to claim that Hart is among a select few Western poets whose work will be significant beyond the current age.

Hart has published nine award-winning collections and edited the Oxford Book of Australian Religious Verse. In addition to being a poet, Hart is an established philosopher and theologian. His 1989 book, The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology and Philosophy, is regarded as a key text for understanding the technique of deconstruction from a theological viewpoint. Formerly Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, today he is Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.

WHO IS THIS POET?

Born in England in 1954, Hart moved to Australia when he was eleven. Hart was brought up a nominal Anglican and became a Catholic in 1980. He says his religious yearnings quickly outgrew his religious upbringing. In a family home in which the only books were the King James Bible and an encyclopaedia, it’s not surprising he developed a religious and philosophical bent.

Hart has always been considered a religious poet, and his early poetry was full of obvious religious imagery. Then in 1991, he published Peniel. Religious imagery was more difficult to find in that book. Only the title (a reference to Jacob’s wrestle with the Angel of God in Genesis) and fragments of lines offered the suggestion that, despite the lack of religious images, religious themes were present.

From 1991 onward, overt religious imagery has been scarce in Hart’s work. However, his earlier work contained many poems (like “The Companion,” below) that addressed religious themes using less obviously religious imagery. In fact, religious concerns are at the core of Hart’s work.

But to read Hart’s poetry as religious requires either (preferably both) an understanding of the concepts with which he has engaged in his theological and philosophical writings, or an understanding of “less obvious” religious imagery. We have space here to address only the issue of what constitutes less obvious religious imagery in Hart’s work. Understanding that will help us, also, to read other religious poets of the early twenty-first century.

 WORDS OF THE SPIRIT

If obvious religious imagery includes bells, churches, angels, priests, and Jesus, etc., how do we know when we come across obscure religious imagery? Critics have pointed out that Hart has repeated words, such as clocks, horizon, sun, mirrors, and many others, through his collections. Australian poet and academic David McCooey wrote in Southerly magazine that Hart uses these words as part of a “dialectic between the physical and metaphysical” in his poetry. Another poet and academic, Gary Catalano wrote in Overland magazine that the words “not only define the basic conditions of existence, they are also shown to be the means by which spirit manifests itself in the material world.”

Numerous words in the poem below, a variation on the Malayan pantoum form (interlocking repeated lines, written in couplets), work to show how spirit manifests itself in the world:

 The Companion

There is a man who will not let me sleep,

each night he comes and trembles by my side;

he cannot be touched yet wind disturbs his hair,

he cannot touch yet his shadow covers me.

Each night he comes and trembles by my side,

I reach towards him and he fades like day.

He cannot touch yet his shadow covers me,

I hide within myself and he draws close.

I reach towards him and he fades like day,

I hear him though he does not speak a word.

I hide within myself and he draws close

and stretches out both arms as if in pain.

I hear him though he does not speak a word,

the sound of something breathing, wind in the trees.

He stretches out both arms as if in pain,    

“I come to wound you and to heal the wound.”

The Holy Spirit is known as the “Paraclete” and the “Comforter.” The word Companion is also used for the Holy Spirit, but not widely. Yet if we see the companion as a metaphor for the Holy Spirit, words like wound, wind, shadow, and trembles also become religious images, though by no means obvious.

The first line introduces us to a “man.” But it is quickly apparent that this man has an unusual “physical” identity: “he cannot touch yet his shadow covers me” is the first of many lines that offer the idea that the companion is present to the speaker, but not physically present like a human being. The action of not touching yet covering with a shadow puts in mind how God makes Himself present to people in the Bible:

While he was still speaking, suddenly a bright cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud a voice said, “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!” (Matthew 17:5, emphasis added)

The angel said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God.” (Luke 1:35, emphasis added)

In the second line the “man” is said to “tremble.” Already we have associated the “man” with the Holy Spirit. Trembling has been witnessed throughout the history of Christianity when a person encounters the Holy Spirit. While the Holy Spirit may not Himself tremble, the intimacy the poem establishes—the sense of not knowing where the companion starts and the speaker begins—makes it possible to read this trembling as taking place somehow within both the speaker and the companion.

The line that precedes it is also telling: “He cannot be touched yet wind disturbs his hair.” The sense here is of a presence that, while apparently human, is also something else: unable to be touched, yet so real that his hair can be disturbed by the wind. At the same time, the wind, often associated with the Holy Spirit, adds to the sense of divinity’s presence.

Two lines in the second stanza further build the poem’s religious reading: “I reach towards him and he fades like day . . . /I hide within myself and he draws close.”

 These two lines give a strong sense of the soul’s engagement with God, expressed by Christians from St. John of the Cross to the author of the ubiquitous “Footprints” poem: The speaker reaches toward “him” (God), and then God fades, becomes ineffable. When the speaker, however, “hides within himself” (in image for life being too much to bear), it is then that God draws close.

FOR THOSE WITH EYES TO SEE

The line “the sound of something breathing, wind in the trees” later changed. In a later version of this poem, published in Hart’s Flame Tree: Selected Poems, “something” becomes “someone.” That’s significant: The later version of the poem appears to point toward a religious reading. A “someone” better accords with a religious reading; the breathing is then connected to the “him” in the line above. This change strengthens the idea of the companion being a metaphor for God, the Holy Spirit, very much a Someone in the Christian faith.

In both versions of the poem, however, the last line is the same: “I come to wound you and to heal the wound.” Though it is not clear who speaks it, our best interpretation is that the companion is the speaker, because the line says, “I come . . . ”—which implies an action toward the speaker in the same way that the companion was said to come and “tremble by my [the speaker’s] side.”

 The poem has previously told us the companion can be heard, though he does not speak a word. Yet here he is quoted: “I come to wound you and to heal the wound.” When we realize that the voice’s quote is a paraphrase from the Bible, we can read it as the voice of God in the speaker’s soul:

Behold, how happy is the man whom God reproves, so do not despise the discipline of the Almighty. For He inflicts pain, and gives relief; He wounds, and His hands also heal. (Job 5:17-18)

 Many of Hart’s poems unfold in such a way. It’s exciting to think that such a critically renowned poet is proclaiming timeless truth in the public sphere while providing a rich reading experience for lovers of poetry. Such is the stuff of great art.

 *this article first appeared in Breakpoint (US) magazine, 2006