"A book of enormous heart, fragility and courage, very aware of the cycles of life and decay, the wax and wane of seasons, and shot through with a sense of the fragility of life. These finely crafted poems grabbed our attention this year and make a wonderful companion to Kerry Hardie’s previous seven collections, including her Selected Poems, published in 2011."—Peter Sirr and Enda Wyley, Books for Breakfast podcast (Top 10 Poetry Books of 2020), on Where Now Begins

'Kerry Hardie's Where Now Begins is full of a dark, exact lyricism... These, certainly, are poems which speak skilfully to (and from) our times.' – Seán Hewitt, The Irish Times

‘… the overall effect is of language summoned and galvanized in a sensitive and searching book.’ – Vona Groarke, The Irish Times

‘We Go On, Kerry Hardie’s ninth collection is an astonishingly well-crafted and striking consideration of the glory of our fractured and increasingly fragile world […] These are poems where the rhythms of hymns, ballads, elegies and laments, with more than a nod to the Bardic tradition, are honed and whittled to an arresting and haunting clarity. Nothing is superfluous here, every line and metaphor is carefully considered to stitch meaning and imagery together, securely and beautifully.’ – Linda McKenna, The High Window

‘Kerry Hardie’s deceptively simple We Go On explores…vulnerabilities: the fragility of being human in a fickle world. She writes beautifully about the spectre which haunts us all: our mortality.’ – Rachel Mann, The Tablet

Kerry Hardie was born in 1951, grew up in County Down, and now lives in County Kilkenny. She published six collections with Gallery Press in Ireland: A Furious Place (1996), Cry for the Hot Belly (2000), The Sky Didn’t Fall (2003), The Silence Came Close (2006), Only This Room (2009) and The Ash and the Oak and the Wild Cherry Tree (2012). Her Selected Poems was published in Ireland by Gallery and in Britain by Bloodaxe in 2011. Her most recent collections, The Zebra Stood in the Night (2014), Where Now Begins (2020) and We Go On (2024) are published by Bloodaxe in Britain and Ireland. The Zebra Stood in the Night was shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award.

9     Search
    10     Tangled
    11     Elsewhere
    12     We Go On
    13     On Trauma, Sickness, Loss
    15     The Task
    16     Grief
    17     At the Château Lavigny, Switzerland
    18     Where Do We Live
    19     Walls Are Meant to Fall Down
    20    How Was It That You Stayed So Long?
    21     Whose Is the Song?
    22     We Disassemble That First Home
    23     Anniversary
    24     September Light
    25     The Coracle Called Trust-Me
    26     Anxiety
    27     Against Darkness
    28     Thirteen
    29     The Muse Is a Red Dog
    33     Breakdown
    34     And I’m wondering how it has come to this,
    35     Achill Lines
    36     The Courage Coin
    37     Those ‘Homes’
    38     Just Another Bomb, Belfast 1974
    39     Yesterday
    40     The New Dead
    41     Herself
    42     Impasse
    44     Trees in Late May
    45     Small Poem
    46     Cygnets
    47     Pain
    48     Shell People
    49     Vikings
    50     Black Radishes
    53     The Departure
    54     World, World
    55     News from Ireland, 1348
    56     Choosing Clothes for My Mother
    58     Back Where We Began
    59     Domestic War
    60     John Anderson, My Jo
    61     The Transparent Kaleidoscope
    63     The Ground under My Feet
    64     Witness
    65     A Fable
    66     ‘…but I’d rather you didn’t tell anyone…’
    67     Borders
    68     Empires
    69     december’s leavings
    70     In the End It Is a Very Private Struggle
    71     Collecting the Colony   
    72     Post-war Story
    73     That Box
    74     Daughter of the House
    75     Freshwater Swim
    76     When Orange Were Spanish
    77     Making Sense of Things
    78    Inviolate

    80     Notes