Kerry Hardie’s first collection, A Furious Place, makes maps of familiar places. ‘These days I want to trace / the shape of every townland in this valley.’ These maps are scrutinized and peopled: a young woman stands on the edge of her life; a farm girl remembers home; a young woman considers her childless state. These, and other people, are recorded in their own landscapes which, in turn, permeate their lives and ease them.
Other poems dwell on the hardships and lessons of a punishing sickness. (The author suffers from myalgic encephalomyelitis, or ME.)
Kerry Hardie’s defiant gestures give us insight into experience. Her insistent, necessary reports achieve ‘some other country. To be entered / like sorrow, and passed through’.
