Cirrus@Austlit

Kevin Hart is renowned in international literature and theology criticism as a major interpreter of Jacques Derrida’s late ‘turn to religion’ and as a scholar of Catholic theology, Christian mysticism, Australian and European writers. Simultaneously, however, he has been steadily, sometimes radically, producing poetry influenced by his interest in Western Christian mysticism. This essay employs Hart’s reading of Simone Weil’s ‘attending to God’ through accompanying, waiting and stretching as organising categories for examining the growth and development of Hart’s own Christian mystical poetry.