Greening from WithinThe Sky Didn't Fall by Kerry HardieReview by: Catriona ClutterbuckThe Irish Review (1986-), No. 32, Thinking in Public (Autumn - Winter, 2004), pp. 111-114Published by: Cork University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29736252 .

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Fran Brearton takes issue with the coherence and distinctiveness of the Belfast group

of the 1960s, noting how Seamus Heaney,'knowingly and slightly mischievously', has

evaluated the group dynamic 'in terms of his own aesthetic practice'. Her remarks

on Longley and Mahon's ambiguous

sense of identity and place, then, satisfyingly

anticipate Terence Brown's evalution of'Place and Placelessness' in the two poets.

In this work the Cambridge Companion provides considerable insight into a variety of complex strains of Irish writing.

On the whole though ?

and despite Alex Davis s run-down on figures such as

Sheila Wingfield, Eugene R. Waiters and Hugh Maxton ? it's notable that there is

more here, both qualitatively and quantitively, on older established names. To

return to the preface, Patrick Kavanagh and Louis MacNeice reverberate a little

more strongly than Sean ? R?ord?in, and in terms of those still writing, the

presence of Muldoon, Carson and Paulin is also surprisingly faint. So too the

(brief) accounts of women poets' revolutionary impact on a dynamic Irish poetry

facing a new millennium might benefit from being less descriptive and - in the case of a scholar as serious as Guinn Batten

- a little clearer:

. . . there is a further dilemma for the woman poet whose 'spirit' occupies a

body that is (in Luce Irigaray's terms) not 'one'. With whom is she to iden?

tify if there is not only not yet (in Lloyd's terms) a community, much less a

nation, emerging on the ground and through the figure of mother Ireland

but also no clear model at the level of the individual psyche for how she

might desire and then dominate that female body which will represent

unity?

It's not that I don't understand this, it's that I resent the amount of time it takes me

to understand it, and the extent to which its language hinders rather than helps my

understanding ?

and it will take more than that before I'll be persuaded that Eavan

Boland's later work should be included in even such a self-professed liberal and

open discussion of Irish poetry.

LEONTIA FLYNN

Greening from Within

Kerry Hardie, The Sky Didn't Fall, Loughcrew: Gallery Press, 2003. ISBN

1-852-3534-81. ?10.00 pbk.

This, Kerry Hardie's third book of poetry, tracks the flow of her pendulum of the

spirit back from the dark, the weight, and the enclosure of her second volume, Cry

for the Hot Belly (2000), itself the outward edge of the arc of assertion of the 'furious

place' that is the heart, which was carved in her first volume of that name. This

new book moves towards the light, towards a vision of an outside beyond the

claims of the local and of the given, involuntary experience (the embracing of

CLUTTERBUCK, 'Greening from Within', Irish Review 32 (2004) 111

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which has up to now defined the territory of her voice) - it moves towards the

season of spring beyond the winter solstice, and away from the autumnal voice of

the previous volume as it made reluctant space for winter, grieving for the hot belly

of life in all its vulnerable, exposed and degenerating forms. Cry for the Hot Belly is

preoccupied with the dark edge to the fully lived life, the fearful covenant with loss

demanded by anyone who decides to Uve in the here and now. The new poems as a

whole are far more confident, paradoxically because they are less willed, founded as

they are in acts of trust as they discover that the sky didn't fall. Like the Marchtime

unplanted bulbs of a memorable poem here,'All Lives Know Longing, All Lives are

Contained', they '[green] themselves from within' in the dish of this volume,

reading more 'lightly' yet operating

more self-sufficiently in their increased focus on

their contract with the reader than those in either preceding collection.

This upbeat lightness of tone at first seems strange, given the predominance in

this new book of the theme of death. Death has been a recurrent preoccupation of

Hardie's, but now, as opposed to it being

a notional, tangentially realized or

reluctantly engaged experience, her focus is on the reality of the actual dying of

close relatives and friends, of the victims of 11 September, represented by the 'field

of folk' image of the sunflowers in the sequence ofthat name, and of her self in the

future, and the key shift is from a response of fear and estrangement to one of

embracing death as a radical continuum with life (much as in this volume her

material in its otherness is drawn nearer to the poet). The elegies for the poet's

father and for Maura McNally here are among the most subtly expressive

anywhere of the human capacity to accompany in imagination a loved one on

their solitary journey down that barred and silenced road and to discover there, in

the place where the forces of death and of life exchange, one's own journey to the

truest self, one's own upcoming otherness:

to be wasp in the apple and apple arching

around the devouring wasp,

sheltering its feeding. Oh, let me live living,

devoured and devouring,

eating myself down

to my own core. ('When Maura had Died')

In the light of her treatment of the theme of death, it becomes clear that a major

development in Hardie's The Sky Didn't Fall is the movement away from the

exemplary and rooted self towards a more unparticularized and displaced self. This new 'self is one which, paradoxically, is more actualized than ever, through its

voluntary disengagement from long-standing rituals of belonging (such as planting in time for normal seasonal growth)

- in other words, through letting go: 'Life . . .

/ becomes more itself/ each moment we let it alone' ('Day's Ending').

Leaving life alone, not to ignore it but to come closer to it, is a central underlying

precept of this collection. As is wonderfully suggested in the back-cover photograph of the author here

- caught by the camera as she bends her head in attention to an

unseen other person ? an attitude of deep listening is central to the volume. In

112 CLUTTERBUCK, 'Greening from Within', Irish Review 32 (2004)

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particular, this listening is to the inarticulate and stumbling voice of individuals'

psychic experiences of fundamental life change. Such listening replaces as the

major identified creative task the acts of allegorical articulation and self-directed

observation which respectively were privileged in Hardie's first and second

collections. This new concern with receiving rather than generating

communication (see 'Daniel's Duck') means that, more concretely than before,

Hardie is concerned with expression itself. The language of these poems is more at

pains than ever to be plain, physical, and direct. This is a function of Hardie's sense

of words as inadequate but essential stepping-stones between other and self. We

live 'our Babeled lives' through words ? themselves a kind of'dense flesh sheltering .

. . / [the] weightless life' of the psyche. In this book, Hardie develops her earlier

preoccupation with making denser maps of the real as she repeatedly registers the

limitations of the set script of customary responses to one another's learning experi?

ences of psychic disorientation. For Hardie, the solution to this is neither more

elaborate or stricter language forms which would 'fully represent' that inner reality

nor abandoning hope of such a connection, but rather the act of imaginative

projection into the unaccessed condition of the other, through using the failure of

the given script as a new script -

that of the open desire to bridge the unbridged

gap. This is why plain speaking in Hardie works as a flat platform for the texts'

recurrent lift-offs into and returns from the broader, more visionary dimension

where the experience she is handling -

including the experiencing of the self- is

realized as other to her purposes for it, is realized as itself (see 'Sheep Fair Day'). The territory of this volume is that resistant space between outwards and inwards

knowledge, between the everyday delimited and the numinously heightened

experience (hence the frequent situating of personae in these poems as contained

within rooms, through the windows and doors of which daylight falls freely).

Although the energy in the collection moves towards the heightened natural

world of'the opened heart, its fragrance in the undefended light', it is no longer so

attuned to the defensively up-from-under 'mole's view' of Cry for the Hot Belly, but

rather to the need to flow back into the compromised and reduced quotidian as

such:'I'm tired of fretting the mind over mysteries', she says;'It is the time / to set

aside all vigil, good or ill, / to loosen the fixed gaze of our attention / as

dandelions let seedlings to the wind' ('Sleep in Summer'). Hence she begins to

resist her own previous, more masculine propensity to seize the day in favour of

waiting to dusk to 'lift the spent day in my fingers / as a woman lifts skirts over

water', until 'Night comes. / My hand opens slackly, / lets fall the folds of cloth'

('September Dusk'). Hence also, perhaps, the volume's presentation of a far more

positive Achill woman in its 'Achill' sequence ? an ageing woman rooted on strong

feet as she stands steady in the sea on Keel strand -

than the figure this poem

recalls from Eavan Boland's famous sequence and essay,'Outside History'.

The Sky Didn't Fall, in balancing the urges out of and back into present circum?

stance, spotlights the human body - its frailty and its strength

- as Hardie has done

from the start. The body is newly identified here with the given world as 'the body of God' in an intensification of Hardie's incarnatory vision which registers, as did

CLUTTERBUCK, 'Greening from Within', Irish Review 32 (2004) 113

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the later Patrick Kavanagh, that the ordinariness of the spiritual is more important

than the spirituality of the ordinary. Perhaps this is why the body is treated more

playfully in this volume than heretofore. In her 'Sunflowers' sequence here, for

example, the poet drapes wet black knickers over the impossible gold swan-shaped

bathtaps of her room at a writer's conference in Switzerland, in order to counteract

the ever-upward directed perspective commanded by an insistently differentiated,

primary-coloured 'Peculiar landscape'. And in the luminous poem from which the

volume's title is drawn,'After My Father Died', the communion generated by and

for the earth-bound body invoked therein is a release from the vice grip of such

oppositions between high and low, insiderhood and outsiderhood, the

maintenance of which leads truly to death:

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.

CATRIONA CLUTTERBUCK

Text and Film

Luke Gibbons, The Quiet Man. Cork: Cork University Press, 2002. ISBN

1859182879. ?15.00 pbk.

Cheryl Herr, The Field. Cork: Cork University Press, 2002. ISBN 1859182925.

?15.00 pbk.

The Quiet Man by Luke Gibbons and The Field by Cheryl Herr are two books in

the series on Irish film produced by Cork University Press in recent years, edited

by Keith Hopper, with the illustrations arranged by Gr?inne Humphries. Similarly to the other books in the series (December Bride, by Lance Pettitt; The Informer, by

Patrick F. Sheeran; This Other Eden, by Fidelma Farley; The Dead, by Kevin Barry), The Quiet Man and The Field are based on films that were adapted or inspired by other sources. This provides for an interesting analysis in moving from one

medium to another but presents the author with a significant challenge. Although the original source, or in some cases sources, are obviously important, this is a film

studies series and if it is to contribute to the growing canon of publications in the

field of Irish cinema, the filmic nature of the texts is primary. What is interesting about these studies on The Quiet Man and The Field is that both Gibbons and Herr

provide an analysis of the film form, incorporating both theory and practice. Herr

looks at the different approaches to the practice of film and theatre in an interesting and unusual way. Leaning towards formal analysis she offers insights into the

114 0'CONNELL, Text and Rim', Irish Review 32 (2004)

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