Spindrift
€18.50
Vona Groarke
Also available as an e-book
Vona Groarke’s fifth collection, Spindrift, 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.
'Many of the poems in this collection are love poems, both oblique and direct, dealing with that trickiest of subjects, sexual relations. One of the most striking of her successes is Intimacy , marked by one of the qualities I most admire in her work: the refined subtlety with which she can load an image – sharply and concretely seen – with metaphorical implication . . . The poems in Spindrift serve as a reminder that in the strongest poetry there’s always the sound of someone confronting with courage and craft the outer and inner worlds of hazardous matter. What these poems possess are seriousness of purpose, clarity of intelligence, exactitudes of feeling and, most of all, a quiet mastery of language in its instrumental work as sound and cadence, as image, as metaphor, as just plain statement.' — Eamon Grennan, The Irish Times
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’.
Additional information
| Weight | 190 g |
|---|---|
| Choose Type | Hardback |
Awards
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
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Reviews
Groarke’s awareness of the artfulness of the poetic act has been increasingly evident in recent volumes. Since the 2002 collection Flight, her testing of the boundaries of experience and their representation has acquired a more playful and yet a more subtle cast. This dimension of her work intensified in Juniper Street (2005) where the landscape of America and its cultural and poetic manifestations produced poems that re-shaped Groarke’s existential enquiries. Spindrift marks another cultural transition, but in doing so it questions the continuity of meaning itself. In common with the poet’s second collection Other People’s Houses (1999), Spindrift has a unifying image, but instead of the grounded representation of the house, this collection engages with the unceasing movement of water. Spindrift is defined at the opening of the book as ‘spray blown from the crests of waves by the wind’ and this is a collection shaped by that elemental dialectic that a poem like ‘Wind in Trees’ invokes: ‘I ask will anything ever change // First the trees say “No” to me. / Then the wind says “Yes.”‘ The state of flux that nature summons here is best expressed through its representation of water — through sea and lakes, wells and rainstorms: ‘Ancient rain, all grimace and sequins: /l t drags its tired metaphors through the yard / And does not know how to climb down / from glossy stilts that stake these waking hours’. Even as Groarke handles images of formlessness and subconscious quest, she warns us against overdetermined meanings and forces us to reconfigure the space o.f the poem as we read. The glimpse of the rain’s ‘glossy stilts’ offers a strangely static perspective on a dynamic process and confronts us with the possibility that it is only the act of continuous eng:agement with the world that makes that world meaningful.
This perilous dynamic is often evoked in Spindrift by the concentration of observed detail. Capturing a moment of perfect attention is by now a hallmark of Groarke’s work and here it finds particular significance when set against the wilfulness of natural processes that storms and tides invoke. Within these states of uncertaintv and flux are to be found the most resonant of features — a tear in the’satin lining of a handbag, the sound of scissors cutting, a car headlamp reflected on a gatepost – details that are not just evocative of an instant of human experience, but confirm that our relationship to the world is often cast in just this fleeting way. Even a poem such as ‘Bodkin’, which unravels meanings by the play of words and their sound on the ear, ultimately shows how significance emerges from the random: ‘a barren spindle, choked ankle-high with lichen; / a fistful of ball bearings dropped on a bodlmin. / Body skin. Kith and kin. Other buckled things.’
The imaginative transitions that take place in a Groarke poem do more than offer fresh perspectives on the world. Increasingly, they indicate the necessity of a testing approach to language in developing any investigation into the dynamics of relationships: between lover and beloved, word and object, poet and reader. Just as ‘Rain Songs’ allows us to see the rain, momentarily, as object rather than process, so ‘Trapdoor’ envisages a lake not as a continuous space of water but rather one divided into different states of experience. Such transitions have formed Groarke’s poetic world from the beginning, as a poem like ‘Sunday’s Well’ has shown, but here they become part of a more concerted investigation, signalling a concern with formal as well as experiential matters. Occasionally they invoke new poetic methods for Groarke — not explicitly experimental but still an extension of the poetic range from the brevity of line in ‘By and By’ (‘Oh, my lost / father,stay; there’s a catch / of shadow / at your back’) to the jaded half rhymes of’ An American Jay’. The collection as a whole is marked by a complex momentum that carries the reader towards the title sequence: nuance, yet opening outward to an impressionistic view of place.
As well as possessing a forward momentum, some of the poems link to earlier work by Groarke herself. The space of the house, so prominent in her first two collections is refigured here in important ways, no longer as place of security but instead as a space breached or darkening. The instability of these domestic boundaries is evident in the shape of the collection as a whole; in the way the poems resonate with one another, just as ‘the open plan of this last house / pulses and contracts’. The poem ‘The Sunroom’ also plays with the use of domestic space to conjure meaning, yet though it ends with scepticism — ‘I’m through, I think, with metaphor’ — this is ultimately a provisional response and, like the central metaphor itself, transparent, unfixed and unfixable. Both the fear of Joss and its acceptance marks Spindrift, yet it does not simply represent emotional responses to lived experience, instead it engages fundamentally with the making and the loss of meaning.
— Lucy Collins, Irish University Review
. . . The poems in Spindrift serve as a reminder that in the strongest poetry there’s always the sound of someone confronting with courage and craft the outer and inner worlds of hazardous matter. What these poems possess are seriousness of purpose, clarity of intelligence, exactitudes of feeling and, most of all, a quiet mastery of language in its instrumental work as sound and cadence, as image, as metaphor, as just plain statement.
Such qualities confirm Groarke’s position as a leading figure among the most accomplished poets of her (very talented) generation. And while in earlier volumes the presence of certain useful influences (among them those of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Medbh McGuckian) could be detected, in this, her strongest collection so far, she comes clear in a complex, satisfying, distinctive voice that is no one’s but her own.
“I begin to learn a simple thing,” she says in one poem, and she’s right. But the journey to that “simple thing” is arduous, as all worthwhile art discovers, and is achieved by far from simple means. Living between the active energy of “spin”, and the patient, watchful openness of “drift”, the poems of Spindrift let us know in their own way what lyric consciousness and lyric poem really mean.
— Eamon Grennan, The Irish Times
Book Information
Year Published: 2009
Details: 80pp
ISBN HBK: 978 1 85235 476 3
ISBN ebook: 978 1 85235 580 7
Cover: ‘Stitchwort on Ocean Fluid Flow Simulations’ by Blaise Drummond (Simulations and equations by William McKiver)
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