We Go on - Paperback

by Kerry Hardie (Author)

This is a book about the irreducible core of what it is to be human in a world that changes constantly yet repeats and repeats.

Kerry Hardie's poetry - as the poet Claire Askew has noted - is 'a dark and gorgeous hymn to mortality', using images that speak to a place in us that does not depend on fashion or technology but braves that over-used word 'archetypal'. It is mostly specific to a particular Irish landscape the author knows very well yet sometimes ventures beyond, always with the awareness that fear is our constant companion, but also joy. Its title holds an echo of Beckett: 'I must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on', and holds something of this despair, while holding to the irrational conviction of 'being enclosed by light'.

Author Biography

Kerry Hardie was born in 1951, grew up in County Down, and now lives in County Kilkenny. She published six collections with Gallery Press in Ireland: 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 was published in Ireland by Gallery and in Britain by Bloodaxe in 2011. Her most recent collections, The Zebra Stood in the Night (2014), Where Now Begins (2020) and We Go On (2024) are published by Bloodaxe in Britain and Ireland. The Zebra Stood in the Night was shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award.