Latest news with #VonaGroarke
Irish Times
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
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. [ The Illegals by Shaun Walker: The Russian agent who couldn't get Irish people to shut up, and other spy stories Opens in new window ] [ The fall of an ancient tree is a sad occasion. It marks the death of a living monument Opens in new window ] 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.
Irish Independent
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Poetry and flowers in celebration of May Day in Sligo
Everyone is being asked to bring a poem with them that they you love and maybe some wild flowers – any flowers – to mark the May Day tradition of bringing in flowers. 'The poem can be any one you like; one that you wrote yourself, one that was written for you, one that reminds you of a loved one, one you shared at a wedding – maybe your own! In any language, written out, printed out, drawn, - we want to fill our floormap of Sligo. It can even be a Yeats poem! We are delighted to encourage poets and lovers of poetry into the Building on this very special day,' said a spokesperson. The event is being supported by Poetry Ireland for Poetry Day Ireland 2025. There is also a Poetry Supper on Friday May 2nd. ATU students will share their work at an open mic at 6pm. Supper is served at 7.30pm with poet in residence Vona Groarke and TS Eliot short-listed poet Gustav Parker Hibbett.
