Kerry Hardie

This is a book about the irreducible core of what it is to be human in a world that changes constantly yet repeats and repeats. It uses images that speak to a place in us that does not depend on fashion but braves that over-used word 'archetypal'. It is mostly specific to a landscape the author knows very well yet sometimes ventures beyond, always with the awareness that fear is our constant companion, but also joy. Its title holds an echo of Beckett: 'I must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on' (from his novel 'The Unnameable'), and holds something of this despair, while holding to the irrational conviction of 'being enclosed by light'. Her work, as Claire Askew has noted, is 'a dark and gorgeous hymn to mortality'. It recognises that all localness is part of humanness; that the dominance of one sort of humanness to the exclusion of another sort diminishes all humanness, representing both loss and the degradation of the whole.

This pioneering anthology goes beyond awareness building to engage seriously with the societal prevalence of sexist abuse and domestic violence, and the legacies of that abuse and violence in the lives of survivors. Approaching difficult subject matter with candor, sensitivity, and grace, the volume is timely, and deeply moving.

These poems bear witness to the cycles of growth and decay that make up our lives. They are the work of a poet writing with an awareness of the seasonal circle closing, for the year and for herself. They are at once fearful, fragile and fearless in announcing ‘For now, we have October…/ October, lined with gold.’ They are also homages to the dead and the dying, and a reaching beyond the veil of the ‘now’ to a place where there is ‘nothing but nothing’. At times they are deeply personal, while still existing within the mythic and the impersonal, as when the recall of a room reflects the ‘casual, artless grouping of all longing’.

Human life and the passage and rhythms of time and the seasons come together in The Zebra Stood in the Night, the seventh collection by one of Ireland's leading poets. Grounded in the natural world, this is a book about about landscape, loss, belonging and transformation. As everything in nature grows and decays, so 'everyone is always inside the act of dying at the same time as being inside the act of living', Hardie writes in her essay 'Aftermath', a meditation on grief which precedes a sequence of poems on the death of her brother in India. This is Kerry Hardie's second collection since her Selected Poems (2011), following The Ash and the Oak and the Wild Cherry Tree (2012), and continues the arc of the latter, 'a dark and gorgeous hymn to human mortality' (Claire Askew), questioning, celebrating and challenging all aspects of human experience. A number of her poems are narratives or parables in which experience yields a spiritual lesson and consolation; others chart a coming to terms with death or illness and an acceptance of inevitability or flux. Human life quivers in consort with other lives in these seasons of the heart. Shortlisted for the Irish Times–Poetry Now Award.

Kerry Hardie is one of Ireland's leading poets. Her Selected Poems covers work written over two decades and draws on five collections. Her poetry questions, celebrates and challenges all aspects of life and experience, but ultimately is concerned with the quiet realisation that 'there is nothing to do in the world except live in it'. A number of her poems are narratives or parables in which experience yields a spiritual lesson and consolation; others chart a coming to terms with death or illness and an acceptance of inevitability or flux. Human life quivers in consort with other lives in these seasons of the heart.

The much anticipated second novel from prize-winning Irish poet and novelist, Kerry Hardie. 'The Bird Woman' is a moving account of two marriages, a gift that feels like a curse, and the freedom that lies on the far side of family or group identity. Ellen McKinnon, red-haired, clairvoyant, fiercely independent, finds her marriage, her health, her sanity threatened when she 'sees' the death of a man in a bomb attack before it has really occurred. Terrified by what's happening to her, she leaves her home, her tribe, her husband, to live with a man she barely knows in Southern Ireland. There she strives to live a normal life in a different culture, to be accepted by her husband's family and friends, to learn a new way of living. Though determined to suppress her 'gift' at any cost, with the birth of her children the clairvoyance changes and broadens into a power to heal. Slowly the rumours spread and the sick seek her out, yet she turns them away from her door. Her husband and her closest friend demand that she question her right to suppress her remarkable powers. Reluctantly she accepts her fate, and begins her work as a healer. But the personal cost is high, and this work begins to damage her most intimate relationships. When news of the final illness of her long-estranged mother forces her return to her native city, everything falls apart for her and she finds there's no safe ground beneath her feet.