Additional information
by Kerry Hardie (Author)
These poems are the work of time and the cycles of growth, they are songs about saints and scholars, the natural world, exaltation and suffering and ordinary joy. There are narratives of the wondrous bewilderments of life, as well as homages to the dead and the dying, and to their courageous desperate attempts to reach beyond the veil of the 'now' to an understanding of 'how the subtle relationships that had once seemed so open and simple/wove themselves in and out of their dreams'. These poems are the quiet accumulation of the slowly learned lessons of a lived life, a life which has reached its October - 'October lined with gold'.
Author Biography
Kerry Hardie was born in 1951 and grew up in County Down. She now lives in County Kilkenny with her husband, the writer Seán 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 Times-Poetry 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 Aosdána.
