The Burning Lake

Jonathan Locke Hart explores in a contemporary context the divine and human comedy, taking his inspiration from Dante, but also making and questioning poetry in a world where light shines "on abandoned tires, industrial/ Junk devoid of allegory" and in a world that is and is not real. This poetry is an exploration of mind, body and soul in an industrial and technological world vastly changed from the tremendous mythological worlds constructed by great poets such as Dante and Shakespeare. The poem moves away from this "sullen industrial waste" and the fires of existential hell through the in-between and purgatorial state to one of hope and light. All this is within and without the contemporary world."Hart turns to a rarer, more public form of address, one that sees the world feelingly in the nerves and heart while grasping it with the mind, assessing it and finally judging it. This is an exercise in moral and political speech.... Few poets - though they include Eliot, Auden, Lowell, Jorie Graham and A. R. Ammons - venture with such authority to speak for the world."Gordon Teskey, Harvard University