"[An] arresting invitation to stop and see. Lands of Likeness . . . could not be more timely. For what it commends is nothing other than a way of being in the world that is neither grasping nor hurried, that is minutely attentive to the particularity of things rather than forever looking past them or behind or beneath, that constrains egoism in order to create space for the kinds of encounter that leave us transformed in their wake. It is a book that means to stop us in our tracks, permitting us to look, to linger, to wonder at what is. Or, as Hart rather touchingly writes, for all its theoretical sophistication and immense learning, Lands of Likeness is finally a book ‘about leaves and trees, birds and snails’."

Australian Book Review

"Hart's work has long been marked by a distinctive crossing of literary studies, philosophy, and theology — each of which is present in his latest book. Hart’s focus here is on the idea of contemplation, which he conceives of as a distinctive mode of mental life, a kind of thinking which is different both from argument and from the kind of discursive thinking typically connected to images and texts."

Church Times

“Hart, the Anglo Australian poet, scholar and theologian, described by Harold Bloom as ‘one of the major living poets of the English language’. . . reveals, in this splendid new study, his wide and deep learning in the matter of the long history of contemplatio in Western thought and, especially, as expressed in English poetry. . . . Such a breadth of appreciation of literary culture as this has never been more urgently needed.”

Quadrant

“Lands of Likeness is one of the deepest accounts of poetry’s cognitive dimensions ever written. What Hart does in the book is explore models of poetic reflection that conform to the models of neither discursive philosophical argumentation nor full-fledged religious contemplation, yet inhabit a meditative domain that is both conceptual and spiritual. I know of no other book that explores this terrain as thoroughly as this one does."

John Koethe, University of Wisconsin–Madison

“In this learned and comprehensive book on the poetic legacy of contemplation, Hart guides us from the early church fathers to the Romantics, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and many major twentieth-century poets who looked on nature in light of its likeness to spirit. A distinguished poet himself, Hart has much to say to readers and writers of poetry. Indeed, this book will interest anyone who has felt the power of leaving some things unsaid as well as the elation of those ‘hovering thoughts’ that are the book’s focus.”

Susan Stewart, Princeton University