The Zebra Stood in the Night

by Kerry Hardie

Overview

Human life and the passage and rhythms of time and the seasons come together in The Zebra Stood in the Night, the seventh collection by one of Ireland's leading poets. Grounded in the natural world, this is a book about about landscape, loss, belonging and transformation. As everything in nature grows and decays, so 'everyone is always inside the act of dying at the same time as being inside the act of living', Hardie writes in her essay 'Aftermath', a meditation on grief which precedes a sequence of poems on the death of her brother in India. This is Kerry Hardie's second collection since her Selected Poems (2011), following The Ash and the Oak and the Wild Cherry Tree (2012), and continues the arc of the latter, 'a dark and gorgeous hymn to human mortality' (Claire Askew), questioning, celebrating and challenging all aspects of human experience. A number of her poems are narratives or parables in which experience yields a spiritual lesson and consolation; others chart a coming to terms with death or illness and an acceptance of inevitability or flux. Human life quivers in consort with other lives in these seasons of the heart. 'Our trust reposes in such clear, open writing. Hardie's later poems are barer, more strongly narrative, and sometimes read like parables and portraits at once' The poems speak to us from gardens as well as graveyards, from private homes as much as churches, and, most often, from the borders and boundaries that the poems speak so often and beautifully of breaching or attempting to breach' - John McAuliffe, The Irish Times on Selected Poems. 'Kerry Hardie's newest collection is a dark and gorgeous hymn to human mortality. Death is, of course, such a common theme in poetry that it's difficult to find anything new to say about it, but Hardie succeeds, injecting into these poems her usual quiet originality' Death in Hardie's poems is a release from the process she finds truly terrifying: the slow decay of ageing' The feeling that runs throughout the collection is that of time running out: seasons changing, the familiar disappearing, death approaching ever faster' a book of poems that celebrates the wonder of our small lives as much as it laments their brevity' - Claire Askew, The Edinburgh Review, on The Ash and the Oak and the Wild Cherry Tree.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781780371887
Publisher:	Bloodaxe Books
Publication date:	10/30/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	80
File size:	381 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Kerry Hardie was born in 1951 and grew up in County Down. She now lives in County Kilkenny with her husband, the writer Seán Hardie. Her poems have won many prizes, including the Michael Hartnett Award for Poetry, the National Poetry Prize (Ireland), the Katherine and Patrick Kavanagh Award, the James Joyce Suspended Sentence Award (Australia) and the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry. Her poems have featured in nine Bloodaxe anthologies: Staying Alive, Being Alive, Being Human, Essential Poems from the Staying Alive Trilogy, Staying Human, In Person: World Poets, The Poetry Cure, The New Irish Poets and Modern Women Poets. She published six collections with Gallery Press: 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 (2011) was published by Gallery Press in Ireland and by Bloodaxe Books in Britain. Her seventh collection, The Zebra Stood in the Night, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2014 and shortlisted for the Irish Times–Poetry Now Award. Her eighth collection, Where Now Begins, was published by Bloodaxe in 2020. Her first novel, Hannie Bennet’s Winter Marriage appeared in 2000; her second, The Bird Woman was published in 2006. Kerry Hardie is a member of Aosdána.