Description
Book SynopsisThese 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’.
Trade ReviewHardie’s skills as a lyric poet are second to none, and the meeting of that ability with the need to break new ground is productive of exceptional writing, reminiscent but by no means derivative of Elizabeth Bishop, in its combination of attention to detail and startling, subtly-worked-towards insight. -- Miriam Gamble * Poetry Ireland [on The Zebra Stood in the Night] *
Our trust reposes in such clear, open writing. Hardie’s later poems are barer, more strongly narrative, and sometimes read like parables and portraits at once… The poems speak to us from gardens as well as graveyards, from private homes as much as churches, and, most often, from the borders and boundaries that the poems speak so often and beautifully of breaching or attempting to breach. -- John McAuliffe * The Irish Times *
A dark and gorgeous hymn to human mortality. -- Claire Askew * on The Ash and the Oak and the Wild Cherry Tree *
Table of Contents11 It’s a small tree, 12 Letters from the Dead 13 Now 14 Inishmaan 15 How She Disposes of Fear 16 Inhabitants 17 Into Light 18 Last Swim 19 Too Late for Sorry Now 20 Talking to My Stepson 21 Shasta Daisies 22 Voyeur 23 Losing It 24 Piseog 25 Taking the Weight 26 He talks to me about field trials 27 Time Passing 28 Real Estate 29 Day Lilies 30 Poem in a Circle 32 July Drought 33 Hymn 34 Rhyme for a Rhino 35 Blasted 36 The Inadequacy of Letters of Condolence 37 Mondrian Dream, Somewhere in Russia 38 On Reading Michael Longley’s Snow Water 39 Bolt the Shutter 40 Shopping 41 American Pastoral 42 April 43 Civil War Aftermath 44 ‘Peace is the root of all wars’ 45 Derry 46 Permission 48 Tide-turn on the Brittany Coast 49 The Stone at the Heart of a Pear 50 There’s More Than One of Us in Here 53 Depression 54 Escapology 55 On Revisiting Gallarus Oratory 56 ...what I call god 57 Sky Station, Skellig Michael 58 Crow-light 59 All Saints 60 All Soul’s Day, November the 2nd 61 Winter Solstice 62 Salt, Flame 63 Bird Talk 64 ‘and all shall be well’ 65 Eel-speak 67 The Emigrant’s Letter 68 Coats 70 Notes
