AustLit

'When we encounter a superb poet for the first time, we relearn how to listen, how to read. In T. S. Eliot’s words, it is “a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate / With shabby equipment always deteriorating” (189).

'We were in Oregon, driving north on Highway 101, and my wife was telling me about Kevin Hart, a poet and scholar whom she had known in Australia and whom we had just met briefly at a conference in Pennsylvania. She opened her iPad as I drove, located some Hart poems online, and began to read: “There is a silence words can’t touch.”' (Introduction)