Introduction

These poems were written over a number of years. They are not always set in the same location or even the same country, but nonetheless I think that they share a sense of place.

I have been sick for many years with a illness that Americans call post-viral fatigue syndrome and we call myalgic encephalomyelitis. Sickness forces your life underground without decreasing the intensity of your experience. Perhaps the limited canvas on which these poems are painted reflects that process.

I live on the side of a hill in Kilkenny in Ireland. Below us the land drops down to a valley and rises again to the Blackstairs Mountains. An old, slow river which Spencer described as 'the goodly Barrow' runs through this valley and also through the lives of the men and women who work the scattered fields and farms. It is ancient and beautiful country.

—Kerry Hardie