‘Elegant, deeply philosophical… Kevin Hart is the best Australian poet of the past 25 years’ – Mark Strand

‘Kevin Hart is one of the finest poets writing in English today. I admire his erudition and his imagination, the way history, art, myth, literature and many things come together in his poetry. This book will be a feast for those who want poetry to be both metaphysics and song. An absolutely original and indispensable poet’ – Charles Simic

‘With Young Rain Kevin Hart continues his “transmemberment of song” into a realm all his own in Australian poetry’ – Harold Bloom

‘Kevin Hart is one of the most sophisticated poets writing today, though the poems in Young Rain are disarmingly straightforward. They have an ease and lucidity that makes them seem almost casual, so that it is with a feeling of surprise that you realise that you have been drawn into a conversation of the utmost gravity concerning the private reaches of the self, darkness and death, as in the powerful sequences Night Music and Dark Retreat. There is nothing oppressive about them though, and the limpid rigor of the intellect they embody is leavened by the tenderness and sensuality of the poems in another sequence, Amo te Solo, which possess a lustiness that would seem at home in the Bible, but has almost disappeared from contemporary poetry’ – John Koethe