'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 on Selected Poems.
'Kerry Hardie’s newest collection is a dark and gorgeous hymn to human mortality. Death is, of course, such a common theme in poetry that it’s difficult to find anything new to say about it, but Hardie succeeds, injecting into these poems her usual quiet originality… Death in Hardie’s poems is a release from the process she finds truly terrifying: the slow decay of ageing… The feeling that runs throughout the collection is that of time running out: seasons changing, the familiar disappearing, death approaching ever faster… a book of poems that celebrates the wonder of our small lives as much as it laments their brevity' – Claire Askew, The Edinburgh Review, on The Ash and the Oak and the Wild Cherry Tree.
‘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.
‘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, The Irish Times.
‘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.
