Infinity Pool by Vona Groarke: Subtle observations take readers on journey of the senses in accomplished collection
Infinity Pool
Author
:
Vona Groarke
ISBN-13
:
978-1917371094
Publisher
:
Gallery Press
Guideline Price
:
€11.95
If poets are to be either 'visual' or 'haptic', as Randall Jarrell once suggested in a review of Marianne Moore, then Vona Groarke (like Moore) is visual. Her latest book, Infinity Pool
,
exemplifies this.
The starting point of these poems is inevitably how a subject strikes the eye: the dense clouds above
Knock
as seen from an aeroplane window; a future passed through, 'like a car through fog'; or the poem itself – the 'infinity pool' of the title – a blue rectangle held against blue, so the viewer can't quite 'tell the edge'.
This is a depiction of the watched world and the effect for the reader is an immediacy of vision: a scarecrow 'derided' by the wind; a butterfly that 'chases itself down, very lightly, between stalks/ of cow parsley up to my neck'; 'Antique dusk/ with its yellowing pages'.
I imagine the cow parsley as
Sligo
– the poet's county – on a May afternoon; while the antique dusk is surely
England
, the yellowish glow of Cambridge where Groarke is poet-in-residence. The writing inhabits both places with focused and tender attention.
READ MORE
There is a third place also, the place of poems, a complicated realm into which the poet climbs 'through tears in the brocade'. This strange state of existence – described in Hindsight as a 'pipe of light I pull myself through/ like a rag through the barrel of a shotgun' – is tested and questioned throughout. The result, as always with Groarke, is exciting intellectual exploration.
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[
The fall of an ancient tree is a sad occasion. It marks the death of a living monument
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Hers is a 'thinking eye', to borrow Klee's phrase: the immediacy of the visual is always joined and powered by the working-out of an idea. The Future of the Poem, for instance, is a verse-essay in miniature, each brief section a prophesy, or a dare: 'Watch it become something smaller./ Watch it rot.'
Although the book closes with a magnificent sequence written after reading Chinese love poems, Groarke, again like Moore, favours anti-Romantic subject matter: a maths copybook; a ball of lint; a coin game where 'the batten sweeps forward to nudge them all in'.
In this poem (Tipping Point), a skilful play with negatives leads us towards its heartbreaking conclusion – just one triumphant example of the subtle manipulations of light and surface that illuminate the whole collection.
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