Vona Groarke

CommentaryQuotationsReferencesNotes

Life
1964- [fam. “Ginger”; family name derived from Mag Ruairc, of Viking origin, poss. Norse Hrothrekr]; b. in Edgeworthstown [Mostrim], Co. Westmeath; first collection Shale (1994), issued by Gallery Press, was winner of the Brendan Behan Memorial Prize, 1994; m. to Conor O’Callaghan, with whom she was joint-winner of Rooney Prize Special Award, 1996; her early poetry collections incl. Other People’s Houses (1999) and Flight (2002), winner of Sunday Tribune and Hennessy awards; introduced Gallery edition of Goldsmith’s Deserted Village (2003); issued Juniper Street (2006) and a translation of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, Lament for Art O’Leary (2008); Spindrift (2009) became the Poetry Society Recommendation [UK]; read poems on RTÉ in 2003 and has broadcast on BBC;

issued The Lament of Art O’Leary (2008), a translation of Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill; served as editor of Poetry Ireland Review, Nos. 113-120 (up to Jan. 2017);and elected to Aosdána, 2009; received Cullman Fellowship at the NY Public Library, 2018-19, and wrote Hereafter: The Telling Life of Ellen O’Hara  (2022), a poetic account in sonnet-form of the experience of Irish domestic servants in 1890s New York; winner of the 2024 Michel Déon Award; publ. Infinity Pool (2025), short-listed for T. S. Eliot Prize; taught at Villanova University and Wake Forest University in the U.S and holds a post at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester; Writer in Residence at St John’s College, Cambridge, 2022-26; recipient of the Irish Literary Hall of Fame Award, 2017; appt.to the Irish Chair of Poetry, Sept. 2025.

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Works
Collections
  • Shale (Oldcastle: Gallery Books 1994), 58pp.
  • Other People’s Houses (Oldcastle: Gallery Books 1999), 57pp.
  • Flight (Oldcastle: Gallery Press 2002), 74pp.
  • Juniper Street (Oldcastle: Gallery Press 2006), 72pp.
  • Spindrift (Oldcastle: Gallery Press 2009), 80pp.
  • X (Oldcastle: Gallery Press 2009), 95pp. [Poetry Book Society Recommendation, 2009].
  • Double Negative (Oldcastle: Gallery Press 2019), 81pp.
  • Link: Poet and World (Oldcastle: Gallery Press 2021), 75pp.
  • Hereafter: The Telling Life of Ellen O’Hara  (NYU Press 2022), ill. [28 b&w].
  • Woman of Winter (Oldcastle: Gallery Press 2023), 36pp., ill. by Isabelle Nolan.
  • Infinity Pool (Oldcastle: Gallery Press 2025), 63pp.[ninth collection].
Selected/Collected

Selected Poems of Vona Groarke (Oldcastle: Gallery Press 2016), 95pp.
Prose
  • Four Sides Full: A Personal Essay  (Oldcastle: Gallery Press 2016), 107pp.
Translation
  • Lament for Art O’Leary [of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill] (Oldcastle: Gallery Press 2008), 39pp.
Reviews (sel.)

‘Very Musical Chairs’, review of The Poet’s Chair: The First Nine Years of the Chair of Poetry, in The Irish Times (8 March 2000) - available online.

Miscellaneous
  • contrib. to Krino, “The State of Poetry” [Special Issue], ed. Gerald Dawe & Jonathan Williams (Winter 1993), pp.20-21.
  • contrib. to Making for Planet Alice: New Women Poets, ed. Maura Dooley (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books 1997), 173pp. [see details].
  • intro., Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village, ill. by Blaise Drummond (Oldcastle: Gallery Press 2003), [58]pp.
  • contrib. to Chosen lights : Poets on Poems by John Montague in Honour of his 80th Birthday (Oldcastle: Gallery Press 2009), 132pp. [see details].
  • ‘The Passion Behind the Poetry’, review of Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds, in The Irish Times (27 Feb. 2010), Weekend Review, p.10.
  • contrib. “Seven Takes”, to 16 (Dublin: Stoney Rd. 2016) [see details].
  • contrib. to The Coast Road, ed. by Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press 2016), 119pp. [see details].
  • contrib. ‘Proper Nouns’, to Seamus Heaney in Context (Cambridge UP 2021)), pp.127-35 [see details].
  • contrib. ‘Yeats and Contemporary Poetry: Twelve Speculative Takes’, to The Oxford Handbook of W.B. Yeats, ed. Lauren Arrington & Matthew Campbell, eds. (Oxford UP 2023), 753pp. [final piece].

Bibiographical details
Infinity Pool (Oldcastle [Co. Meath]: Gallery Press 2025), 63pp.. Contents: “Stansted to Knock, December 21st”; “With the moon in full spate such that”; “Infinity Pool”; “An Poll Gorm / The Blue Hole”; “Inner Space”; “Nocturne With Ink”; “Imagine the Atlantic as an Actor”; “Imagine the Atlantic as a Mechanic”; “The Tell”; “Mise en Scène”; “Lint”; “Setting My Mother's Hair as an Ars Poetica”; “Imagine the Atlantic as a Journalist”; “Imagine the Atlantic as a Chambermaid”; “The Low Road”; “Proposition”; “Still Life in Marble”; “Tipping Point”; “What the day offers, so the day demands”; “May the Tenth”; “Snapshot”; “Two Kinds of Ending”; “Imagine the Atlantic as a Film-Maker”; “Imagine the Atlantic as a Bartender”; “The Future of the Poem”; “In the Cemetery of Non-existent Cemeteries, Gdańsk”; “Hindsight”; “Short Poem About Self-consciousness”; “Introduction”; “Imagine the Atlantic as an Artist”; “Imagine the Atlantic as a Poet”; “The Copybook”; “Ending Without a Poem -- My Own Fourth Wall -- Reading Chinese Love Poems in a Borrowed English House -- Acknowledgements.

Contributions to poetry collections
Making for Planet Alice: New Women Poets, ed. Maura Dooley (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books 1997), 173pp. [ports]. Contribs.: Moniza Alvi, Eleanor Brown, Siobhan Campbell, Tessa Rose Chester, Kate Clanchy, Julia Copus, Jane Duran, Gillian Ferguson, Janet Fisher, Linda France, Elizabeth Garrett, Lavinia Greenlaw, Vona Groarke, Sophie Hannah, Maggie Hannan, Tracey Herd, Jane Holland, Jackie Kay, Mimi Khalvati, Gwyneth Lewis, Sarah Maguire, Sinead Morrissey, Alice Oswald, Ruth Padel, Katherine Pierpoint, Deryn Rees-Jones, Anne Rouse, Eva Salzman, Ann Sansom, Susan Wicks.

The Coast Road, by Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press 2016), 119pp. [Selected poems in Irish with English translations by Michael Coady, Peter Fallon, Tom French, Alan Gillis, Vona Groarke, John McAuliffe, Medbh McGuckian, Paul Muldoon, Michelle O’Sullivan, Justin Quinn, Billy Ramsell, Peter Sirr, David Wheatley.]

16, foreword by Barry Whelan, intro. by Declan Kiberd [An Post in assoc. with Poetry Ireland; commemorating the 1916 Rising] (Dublin: Stoney Road Press 2016), [68]pp., ill. [2 lvs. of col. pls.; poems and translations by Michael Canning; Harry Clifton, Eva Gore-Booth; Vona Groarke, Francis Ledwidge; Alice Maher; Paula Meehan; Paul Muldoon; Caoimhín Ó Conghaile; Brian O’Doherty; Patrick Pearse; Kathy Prendergast; traidisiúnta: Ró;isín Dubh ; traditional: John O’Dwyer of the Glen; Lady Jane Wilde ; W. B. Yeats - table of contents available at COPAC/Discovery Hub - online].

Contributions to critical collections
Chosen Lights: Poets on Poems by John Montague in Honour of his 80th Birthday (Oldcastle: Gallery Press 2009), 132pp. [with Justin Quinn, Alan Gillis, Gerald Dawe, Dermot Healy, Paul Muldoon, Gerald Smyth, Ciaran Carson, Seamus Heaney, Vona Groarke, David Wheatley, John McAuliffe, Medbh McGuckian, Eavan Boland, Peter Fallon, Seán Lysaght, Michael Longley, Ciaran Berry, Michael Coady, Peter Sirr, Conor O'Callaghan, Sara Berkeley, Bernard O’Donoghue, Rosita Boland, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Aidan Rooney, Dennis O'Driscoll, Tom French, Eamon Grennan, Derek Mahon, and Frank McGuinness.]

Seamus Heaney in Context, ed. Geraldine Higgins (Cambridge UP 2021), xiv, 369pp. [with Patrick Crotty, John McAuliffe, Margaret Greaves, Sarah Bennett, Matthew Campbell, Ron Schuchard, Meg Harper, Stephen Regan, Catriona Clutterbuck, John Redmond, Vona Groarke, Bernard O'Donoghue, Brendan Corcoran, Simon B. Kress, Heather Clarke, Nathan Suhr-Sytsma, Marilynn Richtarik, Aidan O'Malley, Kieran Quinlan, Florence Impens, Jonathan Allison, Rosie Lavan, Richard Rankin Russell, Laura O'Connor, Kevin Whelan, Justin Quinn, Deepika Bahri, Nicholas [Allen?], Fintan O'Toole, Rand Brandes, Chris Morash.

Selected Poems of Vona Groarke (Gallery Press 2016)
Table of Contents

—Available at Gallery Press - Vona Groarke, Selected Poems - Preview [.pdf].

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Criticism
  • Rita Kelly, ‘The Sinew of Memory’, review of Other People’s Houses, in Books Ireland (March 2000), p.64 [see extract].
  • Catríona Clutterbuck, ‘New Irish Women Poets: The Evolution of (in)Determinacy in Vona Groarke’, in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry, ed. Fran Brearton & Alan Gillis (OUP 2012), pp.651-[67].
  • Lucy Collins, ‘Architectural Metaphors: Representations of the House in the Poetry of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Vona Groarke’, in Irish Literature since 1990: Diverse Voices, ed. Scott Brewster & Michael Parker (Manchester UP 2009) [Chap. 6].
  • ——, ‘Vona Groarke: Memory and Materiality’, in Contemporary Irish Women Poets: Memory and Estrangement (Liverpool UP 2016) [Chap. 7].
  • Selina Guinness, review of Flight, in The Irish Times (8 June 2002) [Weekend].
  • David Wheatley, review of Flight in Times Literary Supplement (5 July 2002)
  • [...]
  • Tara Bergin, review of Infinity Pool, in The Irish Times (24 May 2025) [available online].

See also Daniela Theinová́, Limits and Languages in Contemporary Irish Women’s poetry (Palgrave Macmillan 2020) [see note]

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Commentary
Rita Kelly, ‘The Sinew of Memory’, review of Other People’s Houses, in Books Ireland (March 2000), writes: ‘Critics have been struck by Groarke’s sensibility, the assurance and regulated qualities of her voice. [...] This is a kind of poetry which echoes back through the poetry we know well, the poetry which has left an impression upon the brain, as it were. It recalls Emily Dickinson more than Elizabeth Bishop. It has a new England daring directness about it. But perhaps these are qualities which belong to the Border-Midland region of Ireland? It is a poetry of inclusion too; there is a very strong sense of the other, the “you” or the joint experience. At its best it is daring, sensitive and gentle. //It is quite daring too to take the House theme and stretch it over a collection, something as familiar, comfortable, ordinary and universal. The notion of sheltering ourselves from an inclement planet with whatever household gods are dear to us; even if we don’t have a house we still aspire to one. And there is the sense too that our house belongs to her people. Groarke deals with the reality of modern, quasi-urban living as we replicate ourselves in the façades of our neighbours’. (p.64.)

David Wheatley, review notice of Flight (Gallery Press), 74pp., in Times Literary Supplement [5 July 2002]; notes epigraph from Oliver Goldsmith: ‘Sunk are thy bowers in shapeless ruin all’; cites poems, “The Verb ‘to Herringbone’”; “Choose one version”; “The Way it Goes” (‘Turn it. Let it go. See how it spins.’); “Shot Sillk”; “Worldl Music”; “Pop”; “Or to Come”; “The Bower”, et al. Remarks of “Imperial Measure” that Groarke lets us deduce the momentous nature of the Easter Rising of 1916 from its effects on the cellars of Dublin’s Four Courts [quoting:] ‘the spirits kept their heady confidence, for all the stockpiled bottles / had chimed with every hit, and the calculating scales above it all / had the measure of nothing, or nothing not of smoke, and then wildfire.’

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Quotations
“The Verb to Herringbone”, poem, contrib. to The Irish Times: ‘Something beginning with slightness and possibly/taken from there. As though unheard of, inauspicious,/the way a pheasant or a wood-pigeon/will find a point of no return, on a lorryless/side-road or on the lee side of an air./Something begun and verring off at once//as though to double back would be the point/of it and diminution be a slight recall:/something with an underscore,/though currently usure how to proceed/or to convince. Like the verb “to herringbone”/or the air displaced by flight.’ (Irish Times, April 2000; Weekend; q. date.)

“High Notes”

On a train threading the eye of north
it is nothing to begin to collapse
the various silence the city required of me:
to find in the high notes of the brakes
the scarlet lining of a dark coat
or the single lit office on a top floor;
to listen for the shape of a name
through glass at a station stop;
to observe the fields of an afternoon,
the way they chase each other down
in the kind of blue that learned abstraction
moons ago, how they resolve themselves
into a love poem for no one in particular,
written to be open, for the sake of openness,
this night and every budding night inside.
—In Boston Review (16 July 2014) - online.

Poetry Foundation holds ...
“The Small Hours” ““On Seeing Charlotte Brontë’s Underwear with my Daughter in Haworth” “Infinity Pool”
(Poetry, Dec. 2007) (Poetry, Nov. 2015) (Poetry, May, 2025)

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“En Route”: ‘Even the Foxford rug is black and white / though matted with a wayward heat / that makes your fingers swarm under the cover / in a lapful of your sleek, unsworn intentions […]’. (In The Irish Times [Weekend], 26 Jan. 2002.)

“Archaeology”: ‘[...] Let’s skew it with a spray of last night’s dreams: / rain that tasted of copper; houses made of silver-foil; / a piglet in a Babygro, for fun. And then, at last, to tie the whole thing up, a woman on an unknown road, / waving a cloth so red it bleeds out on her hand, / the empty road, an inscrutable sky.’ (End; quoted in James J. McAuley, review of Windmill Hymns, in The Irish Times, Weekend (12 Feb. 2005).


‘Very musical chairs’, review of The Poet’s Chair: The First Nine Years of the Ireland Chair of Poetry, in in The Irish Times (8 March 2008) [paragraphs here condensed for screen].

[...]

The essays collected here here do not try to hide the fact that they originally ventured out as public lectures. They do not seem to have been particularly reworked for publication: indeed, the first five words of the first essay in the volume, by John Montague, are “As I began this lecture”. He offers a breezy and relaxed account of his poetic genesis, considering how it is that a poet might assemble a voice from the bits and pieces of circumstance, heritage, family, community and one’s own reading. Once the voice has been found and poets come into their own, he claims, they “start to look like their poems, or the reverse”. Thus, the “uncompromising and abrasive rhythms of The Great Hunger” reflect the “gangly and cantankerous figure of Kavanagh”, and the poems of Seamus Heaney may “often look as robust and sturdy as the man himself”. As a theory, it will only ever go so far, but this is the kind of idiosyncrasy that makes the Montague essays such an enjoyable read.

Alongside his more chatty moments runs a vein of serious consideration that befits a celebrated literary critic: “every country, every nation, perhaps every province”, he proposes in his “Short Thoughts on the Long Poem”, “aspires to an epic”. His survey of some of the great long poems in the English language from Paradise Lost to Hart Crane’s The Bridge, Thomas Kinsella’s translation of the Táin to Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village, shows a kind of imagination that is orchestral, wide-ranging and vigorous. His essays are the most outward-looking of this collection, certainly in terms of their scope of reference. More a Marcel Breuer chair than an Eileen Gray, his way of locating contemporary Irish poetry in the stream of international movement and achievement is both useful and illuminating.

Another outward glance is Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s account of her years in Turkey as a young bride, “Kismet”. Her memories of gradual assimilation into family life there dovetail into a fascinating interpretation of how her encounters with Turkish culture informed her commitment to writing Irish-language poetry. An essay entitled “The Hag, the Fair Maid and the Otherworld” looks at how her investigations of the Irish oral tradition have helped her poems to “tell stories with a slant”. Particularly interesting is the parallel between herself and Italo Calvino, who spent several years “swimming in the unconquerable tide of folklore”, and whose work underwent great formal changes as a result, notably in his extraordinary novel, If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller.

”Public Access Denied” is a lively and valuable guided tour of several landmarks of the Irish language literary landscape that sees in the relative obscurity of such sites as Uisneach, (”the geographical and spiritual dead centre of Ireland”), Ráth Cruachan (starting point of the Táin) and Rathleigh House (home of Art Ó Laoghaire and Eibhlín Dhubh Ní Chonaill), striking evidence of how the Irish-language literary tradition is too often overlooked.

Paul Durcan’s essays on Anthony Cronin, Michael Hartnett and Harry Clifton reveal him to be an oddly geometric essayist, approaching subjects from acute, and sometimes difficult, angles. Moving from McDaid’s to Brooklyn Bridge to Andropov’s Moscow and back to the Stella Gardens in the Dublin docklands, the essay on Cronin, for example, masterfully holds the road while swerving from personal memory to more detached consideration of the formal and thematic gambits of his chosen poems. Each Durcan piece is resolutely celebratory, designed, it would seem, to argue the achievement of each poet before a resistant audience. The same essay on Anthony Cronin, for example, is set out like a legal argument and concludes, “I rest my case”. Ultimately, one comes away from these essays as much struck by Paul Durcan’s capacity for wholehearted and vivid enthusiasm as by the poems he writes about.

[...]
See full review at RICORSO > LIbrary > Criticism > Reviews - as attached.
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Notes
Daniela Theinová, Limits and languages in contemporary Irish women’s poetry (Palgrave Macmillan 2020)- according to publisher's summar, Theinova incls discussion of Groarke in her survey: ’Limits and Languages in Contemporary Irish Women’s Poetry examines the transactions between the two main languages of Irish literature, English and Irish, and their formative role in contemporary poetry by Irish women. Daniela Theinová explores the works of well-known poets such as Eavan Boland, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Biddy Jenkinson and Medbh McGuckian, combining for the first time a critical analysis of the language issue with a focus on the historical marginality of women in the Irish literary tradition. Acutely alert to the textures of individual poems even as she reads these against broader critical-theoretical horizons, Theinová engages directly with texts in both Irish and English. By highlighting these writers’ uneasy poetic and linguistic identity, and by introducing into this wider context some more recent poets—including Vona Groarke, Caitríona O’Reilly, Sinéad Morrissey, Ailbhe Darcy and Aifric Mac Aodha - this book proposes a fundamental critical reconsideration of major late-twentieth-century Irish women poets, and, by extension, the nation’s canon. (For chapter titles - see COPAC/Discovery Hub - online.)