Alive-alive-oh

The style of Kerry Hardie’s ninth collection, We Go On, is elegant, plain-spoken, matter of fact and precise. Like Gillian Clarke’s, her poems respond to the natural world. As in her earlier work, poems often come in short lines like ‘Gaunt trees, stark against the sky. / Running water, stilled’ (‘Back Where We Began’). Lines can be sentence fragments like these, or be split up by commas into breaths, as part of a run-on sentence of a stanza.

In ‘Witness’, about standing in the garden on a spring evening as night falls, the speaker says, without lamenting, ‘Ah world, you don’t know, / you don’t care, / whether I love you or not’. The indifferent seasons are a recurring theme throughout the collection, with the passing of time being paid careful attention. Seasons imply change as well as loss, as in the poem of mourning ‘The Departure’: ‘He went. The branches tangled together. / The world closed quietly over.’

While We Go On is often concerned with death, it feels very much alive. This duality is clear in ‘The Muse is a Red Dog’ in which the dog, ‘giddy with joy, / frolics about on the graves / because he is still alive-alive-oh / and May is as green as the grass / and the dead are there, all around him, / scampering about in the light’. Hardie is conscious that the poems’ observational strengths might lead readers to overlook her metaphysical interests. Hardie’s red dog, she writes in the notes, is ‘a personal symbol of the creative unconscious’ – this longer poem stands ...