Juniper Street

In Juniper Street, as always for Vona Groarke, the undercurrent, the ghost, the elusive piece of reality hover on the margins of consciousness. The influence of life in the US on Groarke’s poetry is evident: here is a sense of exaggerated geography, intensified experience and the monolithic modernity that strikes most Europeans when they come to live in the Sates. One of Groarke’s great strengths as a poet is her ability to give personal resonance to historical and social conditions; the idea of “America,” “Britain,” or “Ireland” is carried subtly along in poems that question what place might mean and where home might be found. This is poetry where private and public meet, where individual lives are mapped my intimate relationships and by a language that is at once vivacious and lyrical.