On this last day for submissions to Catchment 6, we look at the work of Kevin Hart, who has won both the Victorian & NSW Premiers’ Awards for Poetry, as well as the Christopher Brennan Award for a long-term contribution to poetry in Australia. Also respected internationally as a theologian, he is currently a Distinguished Professor at Duke Divinity School in the USA, having held a similar position at Notre Dame: its press is one of a range of publishers to release his award-winning poetry. Hart’s poem ‘Facing the Pacific at Night’ has prompted widespread discussion, including a full-scale analysis by Rowan Williams, poet & former Archbishop of Canterbury, in a book giving recognition to 100 key poems across 100 years.
Finding a Surname for the Ineffable
by Rodney Williams
Pursuing what is true, even if it cannot be readily named or easily defined, is a universal and eternal quest in poetry, as identified by leading Australian haiku poet and scholar Grant Caldwell, in a keynote paper called ‘The Writing of Haiku Beyond Japan’, as published in JuxtaEleven (The Haiku Foundation, 2025).
Giving responses to five questions provided, Caldwell’s presentation had originally been made at the Australian Studies Association Conference at Matsuyama University, Japan, in June 2024.
After outlining what he understands about issues seen as central to tradition in haiku written by Japanese masters of that form, working in earlier times, Caldwell explains how ‘I believe that what the old poets sought was an allusion of the otherwise ineffable truth in a particular moment.’
This pursuit of the perpetually elusive – possibly hinted at gently, preferably in a resonant context, perhaps captured vividly, needing to be given voice deftly – is arguably pivotal to all true poetry: it is at the very nub of a revered poem ‘Facing the Pacific at Night’ written by Kevin Hart.
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Facing the Pacific at Night
Driving east, in the darkness between two stars
Between two thoughts, you reach the greatest ocean,
That vast expanse the rain can never net,
And driving east, you are a child again —
The web of names is brushed aside from things,
The ocean’s name is quietly washed away
Revealing the thing itself, an energy,
An elemental life that flashes stars.
No word can shrink it down to fit the mind,
It is already there, between two thoughts,
The darkness in which you travel and arrive,
The nameless one, the surname of all things.
The ocean slowly rocks from side to side,
A child itself, asleep in its bed of rocks,
No parent there to wake it from a dream,
To draw the ancient gods between the stars.
You stand upon the cliff, no longer cold,
And you are weightless, back before the thrust
And rush of birth when beards of blood are grown;
Or outside time, as though you had just died
To birth and death, no name to hide behind,
No name to splay the world or burn it whole.
The ocean quietly moves within your ear
And flashes in your eyes: the silent place
Outside the world we know is here and now,
Between two thoughts, a child that does not grow,
A silence undressing words, a nameless love.
Kevin Hart
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With remarkable candor and generosity of spirit, of his own accord Kevin Hart has seen fit to provide me (within an exchange of emails about ‘Facing the Pacific at Night’) with an extended, thought-provoking statement he describes as giving ‘my sense of the poem, which has stayed with me for decades’: that key term used by Grant Caldwell ineffable features strongly here too –
‘I look forward to seeing how the lens of “place” brings the poem into focus. I just re-read it and was reminded that the poem relates “place” and “thought”: the Pacific abides calmly in the darkness between two thoughts; it is at heart an image of the ineffable, of that which is beyond being named. Yet this ineffable place is not distant; it is within the mind and is completely open, like a child. Nor is this ineffable site intellectual; it undresses words, as though to caress them (and perhaps to produce a child: the very poem being read). It’s hard to know, since I wrote the poem over forty years ago, but I might have been thinking of Gregory of Nyssa on the Canticle. To my way of thinking, then as now, a place is at heart where something has taken place or keeps taking place; so, the “place” of the poem is the site of someone pondering the ineffable. The “I” of the poem sees the ocean as ineffable, as an image of the Divine, and this thought removes him from the world momentarily.’
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Within a PhD thesis entitled Born of Fire, Possessed by Darkness: Mysticism and Australian Poetry (Deakin University, 2008, pp 252-300), Toby Davidson has featured a sustained chapter called ‘Beyond Reach of Language: Kevin Hart’.
Accessible through https://scispace.com, this thesis very much formed the basis of a subsequent book Christian Mysticism and Australian Poetry, published by Cambria Press, within its Studies in Australian Literature Series (Amherst, New York, USA, 2013).
In his doctoral dissertation, Davidson identifies three approaches taken by this renowned Australian poet and theologian in ‘attending to God’: namely, ‘accompanying, waiting or stretching’.
In considering the first of these variables, Davidson includes ‘Facing the Pacific at Night’ among poems which ‘draw on canonical and scriptural mystical tropes of the ocean…’
As this piece of doctoral commentary goes on to point out, ‘… in attending to God by way of accompanying, ‘Facing the Pacific at Night’ is not Hart’s only poem to invoke the ocean as a symbol of mystical absorption.’
A little later once more, Toby Davidson rounds out this line of thinking by adding that the piece of verse under discussion is ‘different again in its insistence upon a physical ocean’.
While offering a contrast to associated verse written by Kevin Hart, this last observation encourages us to apply a lens central to Catchment, as a literary journal preoccupied by a sense of location in poetry.
It likewise considers a set of strands artfully interwoven throughout this masterful, thought-provoking poem: that very question of naming which recurs hauntingly across this piece, applicable in relation to religious faith; yet also relevant simply on a geographical level, in purposefully identifying the Pacific Ocean within the title.
Kevin Hart has shared with me the fact that he clearly recalls writing the poem under consideration, four decades back, while living at Geelong.
Victorians will know all too well how this major regional city happens to be situated west of Melbourne, looking southward at Bass Strait, such that it comes as no surprise – in this light – to find the poem opening with the phrase ‘Driving east’: quite an eastward journey faces any motorist heading from Corio Bay towards the Pacific Coast.
Yet of course the poet himself has already indicated how he is regarding the notion of place in very different senses here, far deeper than the merely geographical: rather, exploring internal dimensions; reflecting on a spiritual plane; meditating upon personal potentialities; embracing developmental possibilities and internal connections.
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My own first encounter with this very fine poem came through an unlikely source for me – an anthology of Australian religious verse, happened upon by chance in a local opportunity shop.
To be frank, my own sense of connection to questions of Christian faith are less central than was true for the book’s previous owner, who left a printed sheet inside its hardbound cover, comprising a substantial fragment from an order-of-service document, Anglican in origin.
Always interested by pieces of poetry which show a focus upon place from their titles onwards, as a contributing editor here myself, I am always drawn towards work of their own which anthologists have seen fit to include in any representative collection which they have compiled.
(As an aside, for what it is worth, clearly it really does put the acid on a compiler’s work if it is chosen for inclusion: in Catchment, I leave all selections of my own poetry to my co-editors.)
Even more to the point – before I came to appreciate the spiritual levels so fundamental to ‘Facing the Pacific at Night’ – I could only be struck by the fact that Kevin Hart (as editor) had included a poem of his own where a few elements were central, each handled in striking ways.
My first reaction to this poem took the form of a perception that this was a piece of writing which grappled at a profound level with questions of identification and duality, infancy and location.
As a poem of place, Hart’s piece could not be more specific about situating itself in close proximity to ‘the greatest ocean’, explicitly naming the Pacific – at a titular level – in work which is otherwise so focussed on matters that defy either naming or singular lines of doctrinal thinking.
As a fellow Victorian who has likewise lived adjacent to Bass Strait for much of my life, while travelling up and down Australia’s Pacific coast often enough, I have been struck – since my youth – by the very issue of naming, in relation to this body of water, albeit in a way which Kevin Hart himself has every right not to opt to explore, within the poetry itself.
A primary school teacher had opened up such a line of speculation for me, fully sixty years beforehand, explaining that ‘pacific’ meant ‘peaceful’; ‘inclined towards peace’; having an impact which was calming in the face of turmoil.
He added that this was a relative judgement, indicative of a contrast to the more stormy Atlantic.
It remains an observation which returns to me, when ‘facing the Pacific’ myself, especially in its most tempestuous moods: an impression made all the more indelible after travelling the east coast of this island continent at latitudes north of New Zealand, where no intervening land mass blocks prevailing easterly winds from whipping up waves unencumbered, all the way from the Andes, right across in Peru and Chile.
While springing from a questing impulse that is altogether more theological than geographical at its core, Hart’s finely crafted poem can still lay claim to offering a sense of variety in its vision and approach, like a multi-faceted gemstone, so expertly cut as to glint from a range of angles.
Whereas the ‘greatest’ Pacific is never identified as such within the body of the poem, the very impossibility of naming is central to this work’s preoccupations all the way through.
Even so, our planet’s largest stretch of seawater can still be characterised as ‘That vast expanse the rain can never net,’ as Kevin Hart puts it so exquisitely, in closing his first three-line stanza: indeed, there are no strings or woven webs capable of entrapping such a mass of liquid.
Far larger than the Atlantic, the Pacific is seen by Hart as too immense to be encompassed even by mere precipitation, in other words, as an alternative version of H2O: such a paradoxical compliment can only make his readers smile with wonder, resonating all the more with those inclined to study a map or chart, training a telescope on the horizon in surveying poetry of place.
All the same, that overarching question of ineffability plays its part even at an oceanic level, still early on in the poem, with just the second tercet out of nine closing by saying, ‘The ocean’s name is quietly washed away.’
As with recurring references to naming, and to duality in thinking, fibres from yet another set of recurring strands are also neatly interwoven into the fabric of this poem throughout, thanks to a further point of focus which resurfaces: a repeated concentration on infancy; on being a child.
This gives a magnetically human dimension to the writing, while by no means always making the reading experience a charming or comfortable one, it must be conceded.
The poem gives readers a sense of active involvement by using ‘you’, which is still externalised as well, since it also lets the poet give an authorial perspective, via a speaking voice Hart is explicit in identifying as “I” and as male, in his own statement about ‘Facing the Pacific at Night’.
As poetry of place, this is altogether different to a tourist poem, offering no travelogue in verse: placement is internal, but also positions the reader, back into a universal dimension to human experience that may be remembered clearly or indistinctly, fondly or with baggage still attached.
For Hart’s audience, a sense of liberation is still on offer here (potentially cathartic), through being included as ‘you’, while given a promise to be able to be ‘a child again’ too, ‘driving east’.
Albeit anthropomorphic, it is hauntingly compellingly – however – to see how Kevin Hart goes on to make an unexpected correlation between the difficulties which a child can experience and the uncomfortable state to which an ocean itself might admit, were it capable of articulating feelings:
The ocean slowly rocks from side to side,
A child itself, asleep in its bed of rocks,
No parent there to wake it from a dream.
This gives an emotive sense of place in depicting a familiar but forbidding natural environment, built on the shifting of currents across stone, with the poetry appealing to human senses in ways which are vivid, immediate and arresting, being both tactile and auditory, likewise playing on nerve-endings in the skin, letting us feel that motion of salt water, as comfortless as it is cold.
With only rock for a pillow or a mattress, the lack of warmth caused by the absence of a parent to soothe a youngster out of nightmare brings empathy, of course, speaking to the child in us all, with the writing finding a surprising means by which to function on an empathetic level, all too human deep down, despite having arisen unexpectedly as a personification of the sea.
Adapting tropes here found in more conventional poetry of place, Kevin Hart not only depicts a challenging seaside context: he uses imagery that may add a layer of chilling reality regarding vulnerabilities faced by humanity.
With ‘You stand upon the cliff, no longer cold / And you are weightless’, Kevin Hart says himself that he has envisaged a moment of transcendence, internalised within the speaking voice in the poem, who feels liberated from limits of birth and death, at peace with the ocean.
In a poem full of striking shifts at points of transition, it may come as a surprise to find the poet effectively transporting us to a state of pre-existence, back ‘before’ being born into physical life.
Hart’s own piece of retrospective commentary endorses the heartening possibility that a new poem coming into being can be seen as being akin to a child being born – all the same, his poetic depiction does not frame that real-life moment within the process of birthing as attractive, through highlighting ‘the thrust / And rush of birth when beards of blood are grown.’
Emphasis is gained through assonance (‘thrust’ / ‘rush’) and alliteration (‘birth’ / ‘beards’ / ‘blood’).
Seemingly binary in its confronting imagery (since it is more expected for people identified as males to grow beards; and ‘him’ is the pronoun used in the poet’s own explanatory statement), this is characteristic of Hart’s brilliance in crafting his writing to make it impactful in more than a single dimension: visceral most of all, in direct and immediate terms, through its depiction of bloodiness linked to childbirth, it is simultaneously inferential and far-reaching as well.
In plain terms, newborn babies can have had ‘beards of blood’ threatening to choke them, as after-birth around the face and neck, during the critical moment of natal delivery.
Yet people (in getting older, maybe growing beards) might also face danger later, with some other form of peril possibly causing bloodshed, especially around the neck, vital and vulnerable.
Just as uncompromising in the bleakness of its absolutism, its irony, Hart’s probing, speculative voice pushes further: ‘as though you had just died / To birth and death,’ with physical life having left you, and only an eternal spirit to continue with, you are consigned to the ineffable mystery of entering an unknowable zone, where a newly deceased person has ‘no name to hide behind’.
This is brave, stark, troubling poetry – if we could be reduced in death to anonymity, although immortal, Hart dares us to consider that our soul may no longer be able to rely on the crutch of identity; despite having been given a name in earthly life that had offered comfort, as a sense of self; instead to become unrecognisable later, with us left bereft of distinctiveness posthumously.
If we can have ‘died / To birth and life’, then both halves of a pair of fundamental possibilities – indeed, ‘two thoughts’ – are being denied to us, at the very heart of our notion of existence.
As poetry of Christian faith that is so deeply realised, ‘Facing the Pacific at Night’ is intrinsically intellectual too, since a sense of duality is philosophically inherent to the scope of its thinking.
Again to refer back to the establishment phase of the poem, Kevin Hart goes to pains to specify from the very beginning that being open to a plurality of perspective is essential to an appreciation of what he is seeking to explore here.
There will necessarily be the ‘darkness’ which ‘night’ involves, yet there will also be the space – the openness, the points of difference – ‘between two stars/ Or between two thoughts.’
Again, let us revisit key points central to the poet’s own commentary, offered forty years after the composition of this keynote piece of verse.
Despite the time elapsing since having caused points of uncertainty, Kevin Hart is steadfast in his certitude about both ‘the ineffable’ and ‘the darkness between two thoughts’ as being north and south poles that establish a central axis around which such speculative work can revolve.
Ultimately being unable to pin down all possibilities is fundamental, when some dimensions to this world cannot be neatly defined by name or confined entirely in a one-note line of thought.
The essence of duality – the closest it comes to falling on that side or this, with darkness in the middle; to bravely naming the ineffable as (dare one say) God – is suggested in the fourth verse:
It is already there, between two thoughts,
The darkness in which you travel and arrive,
The nameless one, the surname of all things.
Is it crude to wonder if this pairing of thoughts happens to be doubt and belief, with arrival after travelling a symbol for reaching a point of resolution about religious faith, leaving the cosmos no longer so darkened, as the Divine has emerged in ultimate form, transcending definition through outstripping limits in labelling, to end conjecture, just as a surname in itself must bring closure?
Much travelled as a poem of place, while being more fundamentally poetry of the soul, ‘Facing the Pacific at Night’ has appeared in many a collection and anthology, published across various countries, with this no surprise, given its dimensions and strengths, provocations and subtleties.
Prompting a range of responses readily accessible online, perhaps one of the greatest shows of recognition this poem has been accorded is in a landmark volume written by Rowan Williams.
Indeed, ‘Facing the Pacific at Night’ is held in such high regard by the former Archbishop of Canterbury (himself a poet, as well as a theologian) that it has won itself essay-length analysis in A Century of Poetry – 100 Poems for Searching the Heart.
Emotive and thought-provoking, confronting and inspiring in its pursuit of ineffable dimensions to Christian faith, it is still a poem-of-place, set in a double-edged locale, between land and sea.
In the process, ‘Facing the Pacific at Night’ builds understanding of deep, complex dualities that humans can struggle to rationalise – indeed, ‘name’ – in locating themselves in emotional and/ or spiritual senses: birthing and dying; childhood and maturity; hope and despair; faith and doubt.
Distinct yet inter-associated, ‘two thoughts’ still stay sacrosanct for the poet: no alternative is to be contemplated in facing east, at night – while no first rays of sunlight are shown as glimmering at dawn, the poem’s speaking voice does not consider turning westward either; because it is only in the darkness of this vast ocean that he can find an embodiment of the ineffable, ‘The nameless one, the surname of all things’: that is – as Kevin Hart puts it in hindsight – ‘the Divine.’
Rodney Williams
Editor
Catchment – Poetry of Place
Baw Baw Arts Alliance
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Acknowledgements
My profound gratitude goes to Kevin Hart for permission to re-publish the full text of his poem ‘Facing the Pacific at Night’, as it appears in Wild Track: New and Selected Poems, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, USA, 2015, pp 48-49; as well as for his paragraph-length statement looking back on his aims, his thinking, in writing this poem (included herein as well).
A strong vote of appreciation is likewise extended to Paul Ashenfelter – as Assistant Director from UNDP – for also giving permission (as follows) for the digital reproduction of this same piece of poetry:
From Wild Track: New and Selected Poems by Kevin Hart.
© 2015 University of Notre Dame Press.
Reprinted by permission of the University of Notre Dame Press.
Another deep thank-you goes out to Toby Davidson, for permission to quote from his PhD thesis Born of Fire, Possessed by Darkness: Mysticism and Australian Poetry (Deakin University, 2008), accessible through https://scispace.com – ‘Facing the Pacific at Night’ is discussed across pp 277-278, in a lengthy chapter ‘Beyond Reach of Language: Kevin Hart’ (pp 252-300).
This thesis became Toby Davidson’s book Christian Mysticism and Australian Poetry, from the Studies in Australian Literature Series, Cambria Press (Amherst, New York, USA, 2013).
I am also grateful to Grant Caldwell for permission to quote from a paper of his called ‘The Writing of Haiku Beyond Japan’, published in JuxtaEleven (The Haiku Foundation, Winchester, VA, USA, 2025, p 95, with Ce Rosenow as Senior Editor); after having been presented at an Australian Studies Association Conference at Matsuyama University in Japan in June 2024.
An evaluative essay about ‘Facing the Pacific at Night’ can be found in A Century of Poetry – 100 Poems for Searching the Heart by Rowan Williams (SPCK Publishing, London, 2022).