Kevin Hart, Wicked Heat. Paper Bark Press, Melbourne, 1999.
"Kevin Hart is an erudite poet, but converts his learning into passion. He is a visionary of desire and its limits, and Wicked Heat contains permanent poetry, endless to meditation."
-- Harold Bloom
" In his fifth single volume of poetry, Wicked Heat, Kevin Hart emerges as one of the most powerful yet atypical Australian poets now writing His distinctiveness arises from the intelligent presentation of deep feeling and from his ability to attain complexity through simplicity, mystery through clarity In a book brimming with excellent poems, only a masterpiece would shine. 'The River' is such a poem a book of rare intensity."
-- Brian Henry, The Times Literary Supplement
"In their melodic ease, narrative urbanity and frank diction ["Nineteen Songs"] are among the best erotic poems I have read. Harold Bloom is on the back cover blurb saying Wicked Heat contains permanent poetry, and for once he is not overstating the case."
-- Barry Hill, The Australian
"The new mobility of voice and rhythm which in Dark Ange moved further away from the careful regularities of Peniel has been carried further forward here, and the results are remarkable. Without for a minute losing the sense of design so strong in the earlier verse, Hart's voice can now broaden into a wider world of memory and weather, as with the luscious laden prose of 'The Glorious Age', or the supple driftings and settlings of 'Soul Says' and 'The Bird is Close'. Hart has always been a poet with a strong dialectical bent, but now dialectic is not just a matter of argument, but has been carried into the inner resources of the ear and the heart."
-- Tom Bishop, Antipodes