We Go On

This is a book about the irreducible core of what it is to be human in a world that changes constantly yet repeats and repeats. It uses images that speak to a place in us that does not depend on fashion or technology but braves that over-used word ‘archetypal’. It is mostly specific to a landscape the author knows very well yet sometimes ventures beyond, always with the awareness that fear is our constant companion, but also joy. Its title holds an echo of Beckett: ‘I must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on’ (from his novel The Unnameable), and holds something of this despair, while holding to the irrational conviction of ‘being enclosed by light’. Kerry Hardie’s work – as Claire Askew has noted – is ‘a dark and gorgeous hymn to mortality’.