Table of Contents

11 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

About the Author

Kerry Hardie was born in 1951 and grew up in County Down. She now lives in County Kilkenny with her husband, the writer Sen Hardie. Her poems have won many prizes, including the Michael Hartnett Award for Poetry in 2005. Her poems have featured in six Bloodaxe anthologies: Staying Alive, Being Alive, Being Human, The Poetry Cure, The New Irish Poets and Modern Women Poets. She has published six collections with Gallery Press: A Furious Place (1996), Cry for the Hot Belly (2000), The Sky Didn't Fall (2003), The Silence Came Close (2006), Only This Room (2009) and The Ash and the Oak and the Wild Cherry Tree (2012). Her Selected Poems (2011) was published by Gallery Press in Ireland and by Bloodaxe Books in Britain. Her seventh collection, The Zebra Stood in the Night, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2014 and shortlisted for the Irish TimesPoetry Now Award. Her eighth collection, Where Now Begins, is due from Bloodaxe in 2020. Her first novel, Hannie Bennet's Winter Marriage appeared in 2000; her second, The Bird Woman was published in 2006. Kerry Hardie is a member of Aosdna.

Reviews

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.
*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.
*The Irish Times*

A dark and gorgeous hymn to human mortality.
*on The Ash and the Oak and the Wild Cherry Tree*