ISBN 978-1-922776-30-3.
Firefly continues Kevin Hart’s lifelong engagement with the nature of things. Fifty-four meticulously crafted poems in five movements. Each poem in nine tercets – twenty-seven lines – of unrhymed pentameter. Within these cloisters of symmetry Hart paces out wry paths of memory, history, kinship, and the natural world.
Mortality shadows this collection. Family members, martyrs familiar and unknown, passing strangers. The falling man recalls Ibn S?n?’s On the Soul. The Queen kicks the bucket. Yet new life is everywhere. Fleeting life, eternal life, the life of the mind. Seen through a poet and theologian’s dichroic vision the living world becomes a kaleidoscope of image and recollection.
A fifth and final section ‘Flashes’ is thirteen linked poems, each located in a precise time and place, offering, like the firefly of the title, momentary illumination in our darkness.
God’s fingers, slowly reaching down to earth,
Always about to touch us, but not quite.