Dark-Land: Memoir of a Secret Childhood

＂Put this beautiful book on your shelf between Frank Conroy’s Stop-Time and Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life.＂
--William Giraldi, author of The Hero’s Body

This powerful memoir from poet Kevin Hart traces his difficult childhood as a ＂backward boy＂ in a poor part of London, a disorienting move to tropical Australia, and the secrets he and his family kept from one another.

Dark-Land: Memoir of a Secret Childhood is Kevin Hart’s searing, yet at times hilarious, narrative of his first thirteen years. It is a story of survival and transformation, of deception and recovery, and it passes from a frightening childhood in the East-End of London to a new and bewildering life in sub-tropical Australia. Throughout, Hart draws on John Bunyan’s evocation of ＂Dark-Land＂ in Pilgrim’s Progress, the place Valiant-for-Truth leaves in order to seek the Celestial City. But Dark-Land is no allegory. We see Hart’s hidden inner life, his family’s penchant for keeping secrets, and their illusions about the nature of their shared past. We see Hart grow from being the despair of his teachers in a rough primary school to experiencing a ＂conversion＂ in a math class in Brisbane, Australia, which turned him into a Christian, a poet, and an academic.

Written in elegant, lucid prose, without a trace of sentimentality, Dark-Land is a memoir of a working-class childhood, a narrative of a migrant, and the story of a convert to Christianity.

Kevin Hart is the author of eleven poetry collections, most recently Wild Track: New and Selected Poems and Barefoot. Born in 1954 and raised by working class parents in the East-End of London, Hart moved to Brisbane, Australia as a teenager. Currently, heis the Edwin B. Kyle Professor of Christian Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. Hart lives in Charlottesville, VA.