Kerry Hardie

We Go On


There’s a band of black weather under the rim of the sky,
then a shimmer of light, spreading the face of the sea.

A man walks a dog and gulls drape themselves
on the unseen flow of bright air –

and it feels like everything’s happened already,
everywhere people are fighting to board the last plane,

though the man is still walking the dog and more gulls
settle and stud the roof of an empty shed

and maybe it’s always been this way,
with everyone sure of their own redemption,

though it’s dark out there, we’ll still muddle through
and it’s somebody else who’ll fall off the edge of the world.


*


Witness


I am watching the garden, its grave beauty,
the narcissi, their frail green spears,
loitering the April dusk.

And jackdaws, standing on the empty chimney,
their bright intelligence, their blue-black gloss,
their bird-ness, their thick, throaty laughter.

Ah world, you don’t know,
you don’t care,
whether I love you or not.


*


In the End It Is a Very Private Struggle
(for Michael Casey)


How you must yearn to escape
the discipline of a sick body,

the feeding and cleaning and sprucing,
appointments, apologies, drugs,

the duty of always explaining,
pretending that all’s almost fine.

Outside, the air flickers swallows.
Skies, wiped clean with September.

Body – listen – let go.


*


Metamorphosis


That morning in the winter classroom
an orange was divided, handed round.
The children spat the pips onto the desks.
Not me, I swallowed mine, the teacher
grabbed me by the arm, shook hard, and swore
they’d sprout inside and I would be a tree –
I looked. Already there was new bark on my wrists,
fresh twigs were bursting from my stiffening hands,
my flesh began to flutter in its shift of leaves.

Oh joyousness, this stepping out
from my hot sausage-skin of human-ness
tight-packed with blood and veins and organs.
Minute by minute I grew stronger, greener,
till I was tree and tree was me,
and all the room was perfumed with the smell
of orange blossom, Easter, far Seville.
The vision dimmed. Damp wool and chilblain itch.
But still the faintest tang of citrus on the air.


   
 

    9     Search
    10     Tangled
    11     Elsewhere
    12     We Go On
    13     On Trauma, Sickness, Loss
    15     The Task
    16     Grief
    17     At the Château Lavigny, Switzerland
    18     Where Do We Live
    19     Walls Are Meant to Fall Down
    20    How Was It That You Stayed So Long?
    21     Whose Is the Song?
    22     We Disassemble That First Home
    23     Anniversary
    24     September Light
    25     The Coracle Called Trust-Me
    26     Anxiety
    27     Against Darkness
    28     Thirteen
    29     The Muse Is a Red Dog
    33     Breakdown
    34     And I’m wondering how it has come to this,
    35     Achill Lines
    36     The Courage Coin
    37     Those ‘Homes’
    38     Just Another Bomb, Belfast 1974
    39     Yesterday
    40     The New Dead
    41     Herself
    42     Impasse
    44     Trees in Late May
    45     Small Poem
    46     Cygnets
    47     Pain
    48     Shell People
    49     Vikings
    50     Black Radishes
    53     The Departure
    54     World, World
    55     News from Ireland, 1348
    56     Choosing Clothes for My Mother
    58     Back Where We Began
    59     Domestic War
    60     John Anderson, My Jo
    61     The Transparent Kaleidoscope
    63     The Ground under My Feet
    64     Witness
    65     A Fable
    66     ‘…but I’d rather you didn’t tell anyone…’
    67     Borders
    68     Empires
    69     december’s leavings
    70     In the End It Is a Very Private Struggle
    71     Collecting the Colony   
    72     Post-war Story
    73     That Box
    74     Daughter of the House
    75     Freshwater Swim
    76     When Oranges Were Spanish
    77     Making Sense of Things
    78    Inviolate

    80     Notes
 

'Her poems are deeply personal yet have a mythic quality… The cycle of the seasons turns throughout the book. The poet is aware of that cycle beginning to close in on her too…to face that is to embrace life itself.’ - Sue Leigh, PN Review, on Where Now Begins

‘A book of enormous heart, fragility and courage, very aware of the cycles of life and decay, the wax and wane of seasons, and shot through with a sense of the fragility of life. These finely crafted poems grabbed our attention this year and make a wonderful companion to Kerry Hardie’s previous seven collections, including her Selected Poems, published in 2011.’ – Peter Sirr and Enda Wyley, Books for Breakfast podcast hosts, Our City Our Books (Top 10 Poetry Books of 2020), on Where Now Begins

'Kerry Hardie's Where Now Begins is full of a dark, exact lyricism... These, certainly, are poems which speak skilfully to (and from) our times.' – Seán Hewitt, The Irish Times

'Hardie’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 Review, on The Zebra Stood in the Night

‘A dark and gorgeous hymn to human mortality.’ – Claire Askew, on The Ash and the Oak and the Wild Cherry Tree

‘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

‘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

‘The flame passed on by Kavanagh…still burns, and Ms Hardie has walked through the Holy Door.' – Hugh McFadden, The Irish Times.

'Her poems are confident and spare, full of dark shadows and sudden light… So close is she to her subject that they have a strength and a presence that stay with the reader like an afterlight of the experience.' –  Sheila O’Hagan, Poetry Ireland Review