Poetry: Nothing overtly significant need be happening in a poem. The doors of perception may be no bigger than a speck of dust, but when any one of them opens it is as if the whole of life were swirling behind it, writes George Szirtes.
One of Kerry Hardie's poems, 'View from Inside the House', takes a look through and sees:
The rectangle framing the world.
The light behind the figure, streaming in.
In another poem it is "the warm darkness/ that waits behind the door left standing open". Indeed, there is an unusual warmth in her poems, but also a great density and power of experience, where lilies of the valley have "a scent on them thick as a wall" and where "this strange thin moment that's see-through to somewhere else/ will have bowled away off with the rainy wind up the valley" ('Rain in April').
"Bowled away off" is perfect. The essence of Hardie's marvellous poems lies in the way she sees through a material world that is rendered truthfully, plainly yet freshly, as when, in age, her "given name takes on a greenness/ it has never held for me before". The doors of perception open as if by surprise, a surprise borne out of patience, and it is the precision engendered by this patience that makes Hardie so easy to quote from, so that when she asks "what are our bodies but little sod houses/ putting shelter round fire and round love" the image of the sod houses remains, and awakens the echo of an earlier run of lines in 'After My Father Died', where she tells us:
The world is the body of God.
And we - You, me, him, the starlings and thrushes - we are all buried here, mouths made of clay, mouths filled with clay, we are all buried here, singing.
Despite talk of God and love the poems take no easy solutions. They are not in the least religiose. Hardie's poetry has many images of hands. Her own grasp things lightly but seriously. The whole of her poetry is like the closing of a firm hand on something small but vital, then the hand opens and lets the vital thing go.
The Welsh poet, R.S.Thomas, is a kindred spirit, but the darknesses in Hardie are warmer. Like his, her poems feel as though they have always been there, waiting to be found.
The poems of the Augustinian priest, Pá¡draig J. Daly, look a little perfunctory, if well-meant, next to Hardie's. The Other Sea begins with two poems laying down credentials. In the first, 'Colonists', the eponymous beings are "Patronising/ Slaughtering/ Teaching servitude" whereas the African choir in the next poem, 'Ishiara', displays "mercy . . . faithfulness, / Peace and justice". Well, that's clear then. But telling us these things, however decent it may be, is not poetry.
The good writing in the poems (and there is good writing) tends to receive the rather heavy hand of benediction at the end. So a lake "is new each day/ Lying in silver loveliness/ Across the morning"; so, in 'Remembering Biddy', Daly asks, "Where will your strays find shelter now?/ What arms remain to pull us warmly in?"; so, in 'Marie' (about another death), he laments: "Our verdicts will lack/ The endorsements of your delight." This too may be true for all we know but somehow it sounds forced and presumptuous in a poem.
Genuflections and benedictions are not enough. "Real God hides/ In unfathomable light," says Daly. But behind the doors of perception we should feel the cold cosmic wind of absence first. It is that which underwrites the warmer kinds of darkness. Nor should those doors be easy to open.
George Szirtes is a poet and translator from Hungary. His most recent books are The Budapest File (Bloodaxe, 2000) and An English Apocalypse (Bloodaxe, 2001)
The Sky Didn't Fall. By Kerry Hardie, Gallery Books, 61pp, €10
The Other Sea. By Pádraig J. Daly, Dedalus, 71pp, €10