Shortlisted for the 2025 T.S. Eliot Prize
Just as an infinity pool gives the illusion of one invisible edge, the dividing line between poems and the world they process can be magically tricky to discern. Infinity Pool, Vona Groarke’s ninth poetry collection and fifteenth book, tests the limits of spaces poems make for themselves. In language precise, luminous and spry, these poems write into the point where anything might slip into something else — the Atlantic become an actor; a luggage carousel be a reckoning; a poem nudge itself gently over its own fourth wall.
From the author of work previously described as ‘exquisite, pitch-perfect’ (PN Review) and ‘for the ages’ (Dublin Review of Books), this is an ingenious, exhilarating collection from one of our foremost poets. [Vona Groarke's] 'writing is precise, chiselled and instructive for anyone learning how to write well. She is a poet of clouds, sea, light, summers and mothers. Her lovely poem ‘Setting My Mother’s Hair as an Ars Poetica’ has the force and delicacy of the best Sharon Olds’ poetry: ‘She’ll sit under hair that’s like corn on the cob…’ And the prose poem ‘Tipping Point’ is a real beauty, exemplary, worth buying her book for this alone, to see how successful a successful prose poem can be.' — Thomas McCarthy, Poetry & Writing
Additional information
| Weight | N/A |
|---|---|
| Choose Type | Hardback, Paperback |
Preview
Reviews
The title of Vona Groarke’s Infinity Pool promises disorienting tricks of the eye and doesn’t disappoint with its agile, playful delights, writes John Field
In On Poetry (Oberon Books, 2012), Glyn Maxwell opens by asking us to consider the effect of the white space around the poem: ‘Regard the space, that ice plain, that dizzying light. That past, that future. Already it isn’t nothing. At the very least it’s your enemy, and that’s an awful lot. Poets work with two materials, one’s black and one’s white’. Infinity Pool also problematises the relationship between printed page and white space, the distance between the poet and the speaker, between the speaker and the reader, just as the object of its title blurs the boundary between pool and lake, sea, or sky. The title of Vona Groarke’s ninth collection promises disorienting tricks of the eye and what unfolds is an agile, playful delight. To read the collection is to wrestle with Proteus.
The book begins with a pilgrimage: ‘Stansted to Knock, December 21st’. Although it’s a secular pilgrimage, a return to the family hearth, we’re mindful that Knock is not just an airport: many people believe that the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared there. 21 December is the winter solstice and this adds a mystical sense of rebirth. The speaker is open ‘like quartz / on a passage tomb the rising sun / had flicked to light this morning’. On the winter solstice, the sunrise is broken into a shaft of light by the rocks at the mouth of County Meath’s passage tomb, Newgrange, before it bisects the central chamber. This flight to Knock, high above the clouds, puts the speaker in ‘a sunlit evermore’, ‘riddled with light, / my full year split like a pomegranate, / all its days beaded like seeds’. Groarke’s lines sing with assonance. We’re all like Proserpina, bound to the underworld by the pomegranate seeds we have eaten but this is a poem suffused with hope: on the darkest day its radiant light transforms cheekily into ‘light’ luggage.
In her acknowledgements, Groarke notes that, ‘in the early 1600s, John Taylor (known as The Water Poet) sailed, for a bet, in a boat made of brown paper, down the Thames’ and in ‘The Future of the Poem’ poetry is both form and subject: ‘Make a tiny boat of it, / sail it, as John Taylor did, / down the Thames’. It’s an imperative, the poem itself becoming a set of workshop prompts allowing the reader, allowing nature, to write their own poems. ‘Leave it out on the windowsill / to sweet-talk the rain’, we’re instructed. The infinity pool depends on the lake, the sea, the sky for its visual impact, and Groarke reminds us that, although the poem is a little room, bounded on all sides by the white margins of the page, without the world beyond it, its impact is reduced.
‘The Copybook’ references Aisling copybooks, the Irish education system’s ubiquitous exercise books. Remember the childhood thrill at making your mark on the whiteness of the first page of a new book? Do you still experience a mild sense of horror when, in a moment of absence, you ‘blot your copybook’? The front covers of the Aisling maths books were once illustrated with a round tower which ‘gave no hint / of the stowed gold or frightened monks inside’. Like good little boys and girls, it will not have occurred to us to fill our maths books with words any more than we would have put our maths inside the ruled books given to us for English or history. The speaker misuses the maths books: ‘that’s where I put the poems, of course, / small poems with red titles in the taut blue grid, / like a page of slit windows, crossed with iron bars’. The squared pages become a creative constraint, grist to the mill of poetic composition. However, the slit windows and iron bars speak also of fear, the monks sheltering from the Viking raid inside the tower.
Rules and grids offer creative constraints but how difficult it is to leap out of the pool and to swim in free waters, or even to know where the pool ends and the ocean begins. Infinity Pool shows us new vistas and, as our eyes are led through Groarke’s avenues, we’re not constrained by the end of the line but released.
— John Field, T.S. Eliot Prize
Infinity Pool by Vona Groarke: Subtle observations take readers on journey of the senses in accomplished collection
Poet gives life to places and objects through deft use of language
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.
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.
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 th,at illuminate the whole collection.
— Tara Bergin, The Irish Times
Vona Groarke read quietly from what is truly a jewel of a book, Infinity Pool, the title poem itself a gem:
‘And I am folding it now, this pool,
corner to corner, line to line,
so as to carry about with me
its deep blue scrap of lie.
But carrying folded water
isn’t feasible. You know that.’
Her writing is precise, chiselled and instructive for anyone learning how to write well. She is a poet of clouds, sea, light, summers and mothers. Her lovely poem ‘Setting My Mother’s Hair as an Ars Poetica’ has the force and delicacy of the best Sharon Olds’ poetry: ‘She’ll sit under hair that’s like corn on the cob…’ And the prose poem ‘Tipping Point’ is a real beauty, exemplary, worth buying her book for this alone, to see how successful a successful prose poem can be.
— Thomas McCarthy, Poetry & Writing
Prizes
Shortlisted for the 2025 T.S. Eliot Prize.
Read their review of Infinity Pool.
Book Information
Publication date: 22 May 2025
Details: 64pp
ISBN PBK: 978 1 91737 108 7
ISBN HBK: 978 1 9137 109 4
Cover: ‘That Kind of Day’ (2023) by Eve O’Callaghan
Related products
Customer Satisfaction
Customer Service
We’re happy to help. Send your queries to books@gallerypress.com
Shipping
Secure Checkout
Fast, encrypted and secure payments for a worry-free checkout.