We Go On

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’.