Thursday 29th February 2024
Location: Butler Gallery, Evans Home, John’s Quay, Kilkenny, R95 YX3F
Join us at Butler Gallery on Thursday 29th February from 6.00 – 7.00pm for a poetry reading at the launch of Kerry Hardie’s new book ‘We Go On’.
About ‘We Go On’
This is a book about the irreducible core of what it is to be human in a world that changes constantly yet repeats and repeats. It uses images that speak to a place in us that does not depend on fashion but braves that over-used word ‘archetypal’. It is mostly specific to a landscape the author knows very well yet sometimes ventures beyond, always with the awareness that fear is our constant companion, but also joy.
Its title echoes Beckett’s ‘I must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on’ (from his novel The Unnameable), with something of this despair, while holding to the irrational conviction of ‘being enclosed by light’. Kerry Hardie’s work – as Claire Askew has noted – is ‘a dark and gorgeous hymn to mortality’. It recognises that all localness is part of humanness; that the dominance of one sort of humanness to the exclusion of another sort diminishes all humanness, representing both loss and the degradation of the whole. Knowing this, the poet resolves –
just to go on
and keep making stories
to tell to the children
the hungry
the hunted
the old and the haunted

to pass the time
mark the hour
find the answer
go on trying
Courtesy Bloodaxe Books
Organisers Website

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