POETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATION
'Groarke is superb at sidestepping or skirting the subject, the better to wrong-foot the reader and set us right down, surprised, in the middle of things . . . Spindrift is suffused with a candour, delicacy and intelligence that should win her many new readers. '
— from the Poetry Book Society citation
Vona Groarke's fifth collection slips between the 'away' of America or England, and the West of Ireland or the remembered 'inland fields' of home. The poems offer gorgeous bits and pieces of the observed world: the sound a scissors makes; a drop of rain on a blouse; the flare-up of a mobile phone . . . Each pinpoints more expansive concerns where the intensely noticed detail blooms in significance.
True to the Times Literary Supplement's note of her 'precise observation and deftly interwoven threads of thought', this book culminates in a title sequence that glimpses a Connemara landscape, attending to its wildflowers and rituals, its weather and tides, concluding that 'it is all a kind / of love song, really'.
Love songs and poems of desire, poems of adherence and of doubt, Spindrift affirms the achievement of a poet identified by Poetry Ireland Review as 'Among the best Irish poets writing today'.
Vona Groarke has published four collections with The Gallery Press: Shale (1994), Other People's Houses (1999), Flight (2002) and Juniper Street (2006). In 2008, her version of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill's eighteenth-century Irish poem was published as Lament for Art O'Leary. She lives in England where she teaches at the Centre for New Writing in the University of Manchester.
Published: 17 September 2009
