Paper Bark Press
Flame Tree Selected Poems
David McCooey, The Age
For the poet of negative capability like Kevin Hart, as for the speaker of 'To the Spirit', presence lies muted in the drift, rather than the stark presentation, of human experience: "The star's last breath of light still crosses space / And so I find you, both then and now; I am within you / Always, as within the whole of language; always, as / The universe forever forms itself." The promise of these lines is measured by a spiritual resonance listening to its own voice for justification and guidance, doing so with a humble confidence in its own abilities. The promise is not entirely confirmed by the poem's religiosity, but rather moves the experience within the realm of a difficult attentiveness, one that seeks to find in the condensation of lyrical writing the very discipline through which meditation can be sustained. In this sense, Hart is as much a deeply aesthetic poet as he is a religious one – aesthetic concentration doesn't seek to expound or reveal a truth through art (such a reading would only promote a superficial moralism); rather, the dynamic Hart approaches can be said to inhabit the space mapped out between poem and reader, a space of unknowable quandary and startling unease. Maurice Blanchot would describe this espace littéraire as distinctly anonymous and solitary; Hart, profoundly influenced by Blanchot throughout his own work, similarly describes this space in the essay 'The Experience of Poetry' as the site of an intense, lyrical abandon, phenomenologically perplexing yet spiritually chastening and animating.
This kind of abandonment – a negative theology that critics of Hart's poetry have often remarked upon – seeks to challenge the self's own investments: love, faith, sex, and memory equally open and disturb one's resolutions. Instead of finding in each of these the deposits of true experience, Hart describes them as endlessly provoking cherished beliefs that ultimately unsettle the self through a strange newness: "Thin days and stunted days / Unnoticed in the summer's rage for love, / When once or twice, an angel will descend / And quietly come toward you all your life: / He has a word to whisper, one that heals, / But crazed cicadas start to shake the night" ('No Easy Thing'). The notion of a single word or experience that can both bless, erase, remember, or oppress identity becomes a captivating illusion – a whisper just slightly audible above the sounds of natural disquiet. Indeed, Hart's poetry can be read as a choreographed process of endless demystification through lyrical grace, never settling upon the embers of deconstructed knowledge, but rather undoing the weave into an essential bareness.
Bloodaxe's publication of Flame Tree, Hart's most extensive volume of selected poems to date, is a considerable literary event in that it brings his work to the attention of a wider literary public. The book wonderfully colours in the arc of Hart's steady career: from the early poems of The Departure and The Lines of the Hand and through to the more recent splendours of Peniel and Wicked Heat, Flame Tree intimates that Hart's poetry isn't necessarily measured in considerable shifts in technique or content; instead, it is most remarkable for its sustained interest in the simplicity of experience, a keen and subdued attentiveness to sensibility, devotion, and frustration. In this sense, Hart has much in common with such luminaries as Philippe Jaccottet, W.S. Merwin, and Mark Strand (even Herbert and Rilke), all of whom practice a poetry of minimalist design and fierce defamiliarisation. Hart's contribution lies in the unflagging spirituality infusing his work, but rather than follow this faith as if it were both the theme and justification of poetry. Hart relates spiritual experience through a poetic consciousness intensely attuned to the darkest degrees of devotion: "Now feel this stillness / Where two opposing forces clasp: this is the room / Where bread is broken / To make us whole, the inn of our desire" ('Jerusalem'). Even scenes of apocalypse carry a sumptuous stillness that conveys peaceful dissolution rather than violent agitation: "When the last day comes / A ploughman in Europe will look over his shoulder / And see the hard furrows of earth / Finally behind him, he will watch his shadow / Run back into his spine" ('The Last Day'). For Hart, such discipline doesn't come through with an impossible harshness. Instead, the stillness of his voice – "The silence of the poppy as it dreams of red" ('Silence') – insinuates a kind of basking sensation, a mobility based upon endless meditation and silent observance that makes experience bearable precisely because it is ultimately inescapable. What is interesting in Hart is the extent to which he privileges a kind of stripping away of reality in order to express a strangeness neither benign nor threatening, but vitally resonant. Indeed, this stripping away doesn't seek an essence or truthfulness to life; it serves as a practice of organized perception – a Shelleyan negativity that reverts away from mythic proportions and falls back upon the local luminosity of lyrical exploration. For example, in one of the poems entitled 'Your Shadow', Hart's Jungian intimations give way to a finer and darker expression of the self's encounter with its most searching mysteries: "Not the one in mirrors, / Not the one shut up in photographs, / Not the one who feels her hand at night, / Not the one who trusts in words: / The one without a face, / Who sways with your each movement, the snake-charmer." The contours of the shadow cannot be properly verified; rather, the negative knowledge that is captured here attests to an other that is beyond representation, shape, and identity. Its unknowable potential defines the dynamics of non-possessive experience championed throughout the poems in Flame Tree. In other words, Hart seeks to describe relationships – either sexual, spiritual, romantic, or aesthetic – that do not impose or appropriate otherness, but rather preserve it as the defining feature of being. To speak of being in this light means to promote a poetry beyond mastery and control – a poetry of impoverishment that is neither literally famished nor poor, but rather modestly sustained. The achievement of Flame Tree lies in this knowledge: the rich hunger of wonder buoyed by a simplicity of wants and precise awareness.