In Juniper Street, her fourth collection, Vona Groarke asks what it means to come from a place, how we are ever to feel at home elsewhere, and what it is we take with us when we uproot.
These elegant, engaging and witty poems at once retrieve the past’s ache, welcome the future’s freedoms, and question what lies between. The violence of history leaves its mark. ‘To Smithereens’, for example, refracts the murder of Lord Mountbatten through personal recollection, while the title poem, in which a mother watches her children boarding a yellow school bus, strikes a contrasting graceful note. Juniper Street confronts disappointment and compromise, yet remains open to the possibilities of delight and hope. It brings her already celebrated gifts to a rich and simmering maturity.
'Vona Groarke’s [book] is a fine-tuned diction, a poetry of poise and perfectly contrived effect. In ‘Song’, for example, “though/ it will be years/ before we meet/ I know now/ who stirs/ that blackbird/ into song”. Nothing is clumsy here; nothing is under-achieved, nor is there any of that surplus of the unintended, in language or ides, which can be one of the surprises of poetry. The poem’s dedicatee “stirs” — a verb with satisfyingly various levels of meaning — her highly symbolic blackbird into song.' — Fiona Sampson, The Irish Times
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Book Information
Year Published: 2006
Details: 64pp
ISBN PBK: 978 1 85235 398 8
ISBN HBK: 978 1 85235 399 5
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