Vona Groarke
Vona Groarke Poems
In the window of the drawing-room
there is a rush of white as you pass
in which the figure of your husband is,
...
Thistledown, fuchsia, flagstone floor:
this noun house has the wherewithal
to sit out centuries
...
The wind orchestrates
its theme of loneliness
and the rain
has too much glitter in it, yes.
...
"Are they real?" We have pages of kitchen utensils and books
and candlesticks and nibs, but the charcoal pencil and new sketchpad
are squat as aubergines in her hands in front of this display.
...
A joyrider rips up Lockland.
It takes barely five minutes
for a precinct helicopter
to dip and swivel over lawns
...
The kitchens of the Metropole and Imperial hotels yielded up to the Irish Republic
their armory of fillet, brisket, flank. Though destined for more palatable tongues,
it was pressed to service in an Irish stew and served on fine bone china
...
Some gap in the sidings, a man too few
at the turn into the pens, and they were out,
scattering like buckshot through the cars.
Until a clutch of lads in bloodied aprons
...
What leaves us trembling in an empty house
is not the moon, my moon-eyed lover.
Say instead there was no moon
though for nine nights we stood
...
Give me my hand on his neck and his back to my breast,
my heart ruffling his ribs and their flighty charge.
Give me the sea-grass bristles on his shoulder-blades
and his spine, courteous and pliable to my wrist.
...
My mother has gone and bought herself a piglet
because none of us comes to visit anymore.
George has good manners and is clean in his ways:
he is courtly, thoughtful, easy to amuse.
...
has to do with Max and Nemo
scarcely out of their plastic bag three weeks ago
and into our new fishbowl
when Nemo started swelling up,
...
Three bars of shadow on a yellow road,
a sky of Chinese blue.
Though there is only the road
and its sidelong songs
...
I sat in a garden of medieval wildflowers
and let the sun insist upon my face.
There was a city at my back
with the kind of light at play
...
The children will be waiting for me
with blue veined arms and all tomorrow
slaked in the whites of their eyes.
...
Vona Groarke Biography
Vona Groarke is an Irish poet. Groarke was born in Mostrim in the Irish midlands in 1964, and attended Trinity College, Dublin, and University College, Cork. She has published five collections of poetry with the Gallery Press (and by Wake Forest University Press in the United States): Shale (1994), Other People's Houses (1999), Flight (2002), Juniper Street (2006) and Spindrift (2009). She is also the author of a translation of the eighteenth-century Irish poem, Lament for Art O'Leary (Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire) (Gallery Books, 2008). Her work has been recognized with awards including the Brendan Behan Memorial Award, the Hennessy Award, the Michael Hartnett Award, the Forward Prize, and the Strokestown International Poetry Award. Her 2009 volume Spindrift has been nominated for the 2010 Irish Times Poetry Now Award. She has been a co-holder of the Heimbold Chair of Irish Studies at Villanova University and has taught at Wake Forest University in North Carolina; she now teaches at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester, and in 2010 was elected a member of Aosdána, the Irish academy of the arts.)
The Best Poem Of Vona Groarke
The Family Photograph
In the window of the drawing-room
there is a rush of white as you pass
in which the figure of your husband is,
for a moment, framed. He is watching you.
His father will come, of course,
and, although you had not planned it,
his beard will offset your lace dress,
and always it will seem that you were friends.
All morning, you had prepared the house
and now you have stepped out
to make sure that everything
is in its proper place: the railings whitened,
fresh gravel on the avenue, the glasshouse
crystal when you stand in the courtyard
expecting the carriage to arrive at any moment.
You are pleased with the day, all month it has been warm.
They say it will be one of the hottest summers
the world has ever known.
Today, your son is one year old.
Later, you will try to recall
how he felt in your arms—
the weight of him, the way he turned to you from sleep,
the exact moment when you knew he would cry
and the photograph be lost.
But it is not lost.
You stand, a well-appointed group
with an air of being pleasantly surprised.
You will come to love this photograph
and will remember how, when he had finished,
you invited the photographer inside
and how, in celebration of the day,
you drank a toast to him, and summer-time.
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4/25/2024 3:44:47 AM # 1.0.0.1119
VG, your poems are beautiful. The imagery, surreal. Do you have a blog?