Listen, this is the trinity, he said, tramping the wet road
in the thin well-being of a winter morning:
God the curlew, God the eider,
God the cheese-on-toast.
To his right a huddle of small blue mountains
squatted together discussing the recent storm.
To his left the sea washed.
I thought it was whimsical, what he said,
I condemned it as fey.
Then I saw that he meant it; that, unlike me,
he had no quarrel
with himself, could see his own glory
was young enough for faith still in flesh and in being.
He was not attracted by awe
or a high cold cleanness
but imagined a god as intimate
as the trickles of blood and juice that coursed about inside him,
a god he could eat or warm his hands on,
a low god for winter:
belly-weighted, with the unmistakable call
of the bog curlew or the sea-going eider.
*
The Hunter Home from the Hill
Quiet by the window of the train
watching the blanched skies, the bleaching stubble,
a breaking down of colour
to something matte and porous and not at the heart of vision –
watching the winter lying down in the fields
as a horse lies – bone following bone –
the long ridge, the sheep, the blue note of the beet fields,
the bungalows on rutted patches starting awake
out of wild dreams in which they are gardens,
Carlow, the ugly here and there of it, the damp-stained houses,
the sky over the beet plant sausaged with fat round smoke,
all as it is,
like watching him in the kitchen in the morning,
his vest, his thinning slept-in hair, the way he is in your life,
and you content that he be there.
*
Autumn Cancer
(i.m. Liz Suttle)
Each day, the autumn, eating a little further
into the bone.
A leaf falls on a stiller day, coloured a richer brown,
more glowing, more holding, like glazed bread or old apples;
and the lap of the lake gone smaller, a nibbling as of fishes
at feet in tidal pools. The heron stands longer.
Shoals of leaves float further on the water,
the low sun pulses, and light shafts pick more delicately
over woodland and the limbs of ash grown sensuous,
shapely, as a woman from a bath;
while on the alders, yellow, and here and there,
a round leaf hangs, spent coin in the stillness.
I have never known so exactly
this abacus of days. This withdrawal. This closing out.
Contents List
from A Furious Place
We Change the Map 13
Where were we, Who were we, What was the Journey? 14
May 16
Solstice 17
On Having to Stay Behind and Mind the Hearth 18
February Horses 19
The Farm Girl Remembers Home 20
Ship of Death 22
The Return 23
The Hunter Home from the Hill 24
Siblings 25
Red Houses 26
Five O'Clock Strand 27
Listening to Tolstoy 28
Interlude 29
Avatars 30
Late Spring 31
At St Laserian's Cathedral, Old Loughlin 32
from Cry for the Hot Belly
Old Men, the Maps in their Heads 34
Connemara Easter 35
Vitality 36
She Replies to Carmel's Letter 37
The Cruellest Month 39
Fuller's Earth 41
Exiles 42
Signals 48
After the Storm 49
Autumn's Fall 50
Northumberland 51
Things that are Lost 52
What's Left 53
That Old Song 54
from The Sky Didn't Fall
After My Father Died 55
Rain in April 56
Flow 58
Trapped Swallow 59
Sheep Fair Day 60
On Derry's Walls 62
from Sunflowers
Le cheval 63
I don’t go to the sunflower field 64
Enough 64
from Achill
Achill September 65
The Hill Behind the House 66
Autumn 67
Winter Heart 68
When Maura had Died 69
from The Silence Came Close
Flesh 70
Flood 71
Near Loughrea 72
On Not Visiting My Aunt in Hospital 73
After Rage 74
The High Pyrenees 75
The Butcher's Wife 76
The Dregs of the Year 77
February Snow 78
Your China-poem Came in the Post 79
Communication 81
October 82
In Bed Again 83
Solitude 84
Derrynane '05 85
from Only This Room
Earthen 86
Unrest 87
Old 88
from The Red Window 89
La Vie en Rose 90
Osip Mandelstam 91
Coming of Age in the Musee d'Orsay 92
Genesis 93
Winter Morning 94
from Kells Priory
The Gardener’s Grumble 95
Rebellion 96
Humankind 97
September Thoughts 98
Helplessness 99
Samhain 100
Marriage 101
Thirty Years 102
Related Reviews
‘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, The Irish Times.
‘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.
