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 that illuminate the whole collection.
