Selected Poems

"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, Irish Times. "Kerry Hardie writes about the here and now, the everyday and the ordinary in an authentic lyric voice. She speaks of God in our secular age without unease or embarrassment. This deeply spiritual book is deceptively immediate and it yields its mystery and depth in each rereading" - Judges' citation, Michael Hartnett Award for Poetry, 2005. "Hardie's poetry is brave, steadily confronting both the deaths of her loved ones and her own experiences with illness as an ME sufferer. Her collections contain gentle, but insistent, works of memento mori - What makes her work exceptional is how skilfully she illustrates the connection between humanity and the cycles in the natural world. Poems and lives move through the unstoppable clockwork of seasons in her collections - A unique aspect of Hardie's poetry is the hope that is present in all her collections. She guides us through tragedy, reassuring us but never romanticising the true nature of life" - Jennifer Matthews, Poetry International.