Reviews

In this, her fifth collection, community is renounced for the solitude of the mystic.
   Hardie's heaven is pure serenity; in her opening poem, she admires the cold eyes of seagulls that 'call out to something inside me / that is empty and fearless and fierce.'
  Always mindful of the pastoral calendar, Only This Room moves from harvest to mid-winter and the gathering of the dead . . . at home in her favoured haunts such as Ballinskelligs Bay, the 'luminous ground for this drifting, this talking' catches flame once again.

— Selina Guinness, The Irish Times, 1 January 2010

Sparse, open, trusting to plainness, deceptively clear and direct, Hardie's collection can conjure a scene in very few words. Take the haunting sequence "The Red Window", which measures gradually changing skies viewed from a single room – "that morning you wake / to find the red window / is full up with weather." The book is full of descriptions of birds and birdsong, opening with "the herring gulls on the rail" and ending with "a racket of birdsong, vibrating the air". In between, the poetry spills over with choughs, swallows, herons, magpies and even humans transformed to birds. She's also adept at conjuring city scenes, whether memories of Paris or darker, mysterious portraits of Clydeside ("when a ship's pulling out / to the wailing of horns / all the tenements glide slowly seawards"), and there are vivid glimpses of the townscapes of County Kilkenny where Hardie lives. But it's in her quiet fascination with the sky in all its everyday shape-shifting glory that the work is most at home: "Rain falls all day and it is dark for August. / The sky has wandered off to somewhere else."

— Charles Bainbridge, The Guardian, 11 December 2010