Description
Book SynopsisKerry 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.
Trade Review"The essence of her marvellous poems lies in the way she sees through a material world that is rendered truthfully, plainly yet freshly" - George Szirtes, Irish Times. "Kerry Hardie writes about the here and now, the everyday and the ordinary in an authentic lyric voice. She speaks of God in our secular age without unease or embarrassment. This deeply spiritual book is deceptively immediate and it yields its mystery and depth in each rereading" - Judges' citation, Michael Hartnett Award for Poetry, 2005. "Hardie's poetry is brave, steadily confronting both the deaths of her loved ones and her own experiences with illness as an ME sufferer. Her collections contain gentle, but insistent, works of memento mori - What makes her work exceptional is how skilfully she illustrates the connection between humanity and the cycles in the natural world. Poems and lives move through the unstoppable clockwork of seasons in her collections - A unique aspect of Hardie's poetry is the hope that is present in all her collections. She guides us through tragedy, reassuring us but never romanticising the true nature of life" - Jennifer Matthews, Poetry International.
