DARK-LAND

A poet mines his past to discover who he once was.

“Now, over sixty, I find myself at the center of a storm of feelings I have not known for more than fifty years,” writes prolific poet Hart (b. 1954) in this intimate narrative, which begins in a “grimy part of London” in a “dark council house.” As the author writes, “the reptilian eyes of teachers” ruled over his school. He recounts being bullied regularly, even berated for writing with his left hand, and caning was common. For Hart, “childhood had been an immense plane without perspective.” Gifted a Parker fountain pen, his “talisman,” in his final year of primary school, he created imaginary creatures in his alphabet book and listened to the BBC’s performance of The Pilgrim’s Progress. “Ever so slowly the world was changing,” he writes, “and ever so quietly pulling us along with it, as though by a single hair.” An outsider looking in, the author “would have to chisel my way through time.” At Eastbrook Boys School, he was “so ordinary and so insignificant.” Hart lovingly recalls getting dressed up for their two-week caravan vacation in Folkestone, even as he confesses that he “lived deep within myself.” When his parents told him they were moving to Australia, he “felt as though I was being led to the very brink of the map of all I knew.” In hot, mosquito-infested Brisbane, they lived in a camp before they got a small house. An athletics test, high school, suddenly enjoyable algebra, ticks, fruit bats, religion, poetry, family secrets—Hart is excellent at capturing his misty inner life and his many experiences and adventures adapting to a new environment and “dreams so florid, so rich, and so elusive that when I woke up, I was shaken by them.”

Vivid, anguished memories abound in this poignant memoir.