Review by Philip Harvey first published in Text, Vol. 29, Issue 1, April 2025. Thanks to the editors Aidan Coleman and Verity Oswin. Kevin Hart ‘Lands of likeness : for a poetics of contemplation’ University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2023 ‘Dark-Land : memoir of a secret childhood’ Paul Dry Books, Philadelphia, 2024 I The copious, sprawling, adventurous Gifford lectures found in Kevin Hart’s ‘Lands of Likeness’ are claimed to be focused in the first instance on contemplation, and then on contemplation and modern poetry. In other words, two of the abiding preoccupations of this author: (1) the primarily religious question of prayer, how we as humans relate to God and the world; and (2) why we turn our language into poetic forms, and why we do that in the context of a world recovering from modernity. However, the lectures chart the altering understanding of the term ‘contemplation’ itself, with strong accent on cultural definitio...