Coaxing a world into plain view

POETRY: EAMON GRENNANreviews SpindriftBy Vona Groarke, The Gallery Press, 75 pp. €11.95 pbk, €18.50 hbk

IN ONE OF THE POEMS in this luminous new collection the poet says she is “lost for words”; in another she declares “I’m trying, hard and fast, to hold my breath.” Between such sensed loss and such deliberate silence, Vona Groarke coaxes her world – with its sensuous physical details, its wryly observed oddities of character and action, its depths of compassion and understanding – into plain view, beyond any hint of self-regard or rhetorical affectation.

Hers is an imagination open to a broad spectrum of life as is, dealing with the small circle of family, the smaller circle of intimate relationship, the wider circle of the social world. Each of the poems gives me the sense of going on a journey, one that can lead (in Horses, for example) from a witty imagism to a tender, familial in memoriam. A subtle wielder and weaver of words, Groarke is capable of a statement as emotionally naked as "the world means more to me because you're in it" or of one as frilled out in the collar and lace of metaphor as "Take a brace of conifers / as though it were a bolt of cloth / of black and olive green and cutwork stars."

Many of the poems in this collection are love poems, both oblique and direct, dealing with that trickiest of subjects, sexual relations. One of the most striking of her successes is Intimacy, marked by one of the qualities I most admire in her work: the refined subtlety with which she can load an image – sharply and concretely seen – with metaphorical implication.

Here it is the image of a peacock feather that carries in itself, as she describes it, the burden of an unsettled relationship, of a loss acutely felt, exactly delineated. As in any strong lyricism, the poem lodges itself firmly in a world of fact while reverberating with unspoken feeling. In this case it’s the simple, understated title that alerts the reader to a way of reading the poem’s particulars, preparing our minds to respond to its delicately but exactly weighted language. Here is the first half:

How did the peacock feather come to be

found out in the yard, trampled, half-broken,

its wild eye tamed with dirt?

The last I saw, it was in the pewter jug

on the mantelpiece, so full of itself

the whole room bent into its good grace.

What I love here is how the beautiful image is introduced with such casual colloquialism; how the “I” of the poem is at once intensely personal, not at all egotistical but dissolved into a tone of calm interrogation and simple observation; and how the small plain facts are released suddenly in that last line into a play of words that animates everything with a feeling both extravagant and discreet, the poet composing a perfect verbal vehicle for the way a consciousness can be at the same time fiercely aware both of what is outside and of what is inside the observing self.

This habit of revelatory metaphor – letting, as Ezra Pound says, the fact be the sufficient symbol – is one of the driving energies of Groarke’s intense yet quiet, lyrical imagination, so even a small riff on rain can bear the burden of emotional disturbance: “Ancient rain, all grimace and sequins / . . . contradicts our every word, corners us / . . . calling to each other from separate rooms / across silences that don’t happen at once.”

But, beyond metaphor, it’s in the hard-earned plain-spokenness of a consciousness caught between lives and places (Ireland, the US, England; and by “caught” I mean poised and seen, as well as enclosed) that Groarke manages, while maintaining a brilliantly balanced surface of relevant particulars, still “to immerse myself at dark heart” of things.

With their brilliant mix of grace, good humour and a kind of compassionate common sense, her poems provide both pleasure and revelation, being at once alert to the lyrical post-romantic possibilities of landscape or seascape and to the social forces that underlie or operate upon them (“The waves break a cleaner white / than the Planning Application / fixed to the gatepost”).

The poems in Spindriftserve as a reminder that in the strongest poetry there's always the sound of someone confronting with courage and craft the outer and inner worlds of hazardous matter. What these poems possess are seriousness of purpose, clarity of intelligence, exactitudes of feeling and, most of all, a quiet mastery of language in its instrumental work as sound and cadence, as image, as metaphor, as just plain statement.

Such qualities confirm Groarke’s position as a leading figure among the most accomplished poets of her (very talented) generation. And while in earlier volumes the presence of certain useful influences (among them those of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Medbh McGuckian) could be detected, in this, her strongest collection so far, she comes clear in a complex, satisfying, distinctive voice that is no one’s but her own.

"I begin to learn a simple thing," she says in one poem, and she's right. But the journey to that "simple thing" is arduous, as all worthwhile art discovers, and is achieved by far from simple means. Living between the active energy of "spin", and the patient, watchful openness of "drift", the poems of Spindriftlet us know in their own way what lyric consciousness and lyric poem really mean.

Eamon Grennan's most recent collection of poems is Out of Breath