Kevin Hart (poet)

[1] As a theologian and philosopher, Hart's work epitomizes the "theological turn" in phenomenology, with a focus on figures like Maurice Blanchot, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Luc Marion and Jacques Derrida.

In his professional life, Kevin Hart is primarily known as a theologian who works in two areas: systematic theology and religion and literature.

[9] One facet of his work is extensive commentary on the writing of the atheist Maurice Blanchot to whom he has devoted four books: The Dark Gaze, The Power of Contestation, Nowhere without No, and Clandestine Encounters.

Hart's analysis on Blanchot was praised by Peter Craven as combining "an attractive expository technique with an openness to speculative ideas".

[14] In addition to Shelley, Hart also cites T. S. Eliot, Charles Baudelaire, Paul Éluard, Vasko Popa, Zbigniew Herbert and Gerard Manley Hopkins as influences.

Hart's volume Flame Tree was considered, then rejected, for the English Literature Victorian Certificate of Education in Victoria, Australia, on grounds of obscenity.

[26][27] while Christian Sheppard, reviewing the same volume, said "The primary pleasure of Hart's poetry, however, is an easy rhythmed, swiftly flowing line tracing the moment-by-moment impressions of an often impassioned yet always lucid mind".

[25] Lehmann, for instance, found Hart's 2008 volume, Young Rain to be self-indulgent and lacking in clear, specific meaning.

[26] Kevin Gardner, an American critic and professor, has noted that Hart's poems "have an annoying tendency toward abstraction" and a "narcissistic symbolism" that frustrates with "surreal obfuscation."

Examples from Hart's poems that Gardner cites include "the curved eyelids of a young hand," "you kiss / Like a slack orchid tongue in Cairns," death "folded tightly / Like a parachute," "let’s eat the splinters in the house," "And filch a little mouse called fear.