Kerry Hardie’s five collections, published by The Gallery Press, have garnered praise and prizes and have attracted a growing band of devoted readers. Her work is celebrated for its particular way of seeing, a rhapsodic recording of landscape and weather in cherished places — the valleys around her Kilkenny home, ancient monastic settlements and isolated islands.
Selected Poems distils almost twenty years’ work, charts adventures in Australia, China, Paris and the Pyrenees and encompasses grief and loss while honouring thirty years of marriage. Above all, her work maps emotional states, ‘the way things are’ . . . ‘all as it is’ . . . ‘Lives. Theirs, ours. Human times are mostly hard.’ A long sequence explores the trials of exile. Yet for all such hardships her parables of experience find and offer consolation.
In Poetry Ireland Review Jaki McCarrick recently commended the poems’ ‘deep slow burn . . . Long after they have been read their profound and simple power persists.’