Hardie’s skills as a lyric poet are second to none, and the meeting of that ability with the need to break new ground is productive of exceptional writing, reminiscent but by no means derivative of Elizabeth Bishop, in its combination of attention to detail and startling, subtly-worked-towards insight.
Miriam Gamble
Poetry Ireland [on The Zebra Stood in the ... Read moreNight]
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
A dark and gorgeous hymn to human mortality.
Claire Askew
on The Ash and the Oak and the Wild Cherry Tree
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