Woman of Winter Review in The Irish Times by Martina Evans:
Vona Groarke, whose acclaimed version of The Lament for Art O’Leary was published by Gallery in 2007, gives her idiosyncratic voice to another “dramatic, articulate, wounded and resistant female protagonist” in Woman of Winter (Gallery, €15), her new version of The Lament of the Old Woman of Beare. Responding to the poem’s deep engagement “with how the world is to be experienced through the body … specifically, through the body of a woman whose social standing has been compromised as she has aged”, Groarke extends this “forensic examination” of the ageing body, “now I’m worn thin as threadbare cloth my bare-bone life pokes through”.
The “bony arms” of Kuno Meyer’s original translation are likened to “whins in winter”, a tactile image that falls beautifully alliterative on the ear, setting up the rich sense of texture which characterises Groarke’s translation, “The green coat over Drummain /looks better than my dun brown./ And the fine-spun over its early fields is more pleasing than my coarse grain.”
This vivid tactility is complemented by Isabel Nolan’s delightful black and white drawings, inspired by images from old handwritten manuscripts. “After food/another hunger; after light another dark./ And no point tussling with either, no, /when you’ve had joy of both.”
Woman of Winter is as relevant to the 21st-century woman as it is true to the spirit of the original lament, its pitiless, richly assonantal voice commanding trust with its honest dissection of a “cramped, parched room” and it brings its own bittersweet light to an unexpectedly consoling lyrical conclusion, “the day I loved and the day I didn’t;/ not long, either of them,/now I look back;/not long at all in the end//but lovely too, sweet as the sea/ on a May afternoon/when the tide,/coming in just as far as it comes,/ slips away off, quietly.”
