‘Kerry Hardie writes about the here and now, the everday and the ordinary in an authentic lyric voice. She speaks of God in our secular age without unease or embarrassment. This deeply spiritual book [The Sky Didn’t Fall] is deceptively immediate and it yields its mystery and depth in each rereading’
                                     — Judges’ citation, Hartnett Award for Poetry 2005

The Silence Came Close continues Kerry Hardie’s act of attention to ‘the way things are’ in places as familiar as Ireland and as new and exotic as the Pyrenees, Eastern Europe, Australia and China. Because their lessons are so hard-won, ‘maybe there’s more to life than sickness’, the poems in this book intensify the mood of upbeat celebration.