Oh, let me live living, devoured and devouring, eating myself down to my own core.’ — When Maura had Died The Sky Didn’t Fall is Kerry Hardie’s third and most varied collection. Series of poems set in Switzerland, its ?elds of sun?owers, and on Achill, ‘island of bones and stones’, complement more familiar responses to the landscape and weather surrounding her Kilkenny home. To details such as the bare branches ‘fruited’ with birds, the ?elds’ ‘froth with ?owering grasses’ and ‘the patience of June ?owers’, she adds a number of narratives — or parables — in which experience yields a spiritual lesson and consolation. Human life quivers in consort with other lives in these seasons of the heart. Through sharper observation the author aspires to deeper thought, and her book’s multiple lights of days and dusk reveal a calendar in which ‘unplanted bulbs / are greening them-selves from within’.