any poems in Vona Groarke’s
fifth full collection, Juniper Street, privilege the
imagination and the child’s perspective. They also express a yearning to
experience what lies just beyond the limits of perception and rational
thought, yet Groarke’s verse demonstrates little of the fuzzy imprecision
of Romantic poetry and none of its tendency to gloss social reality. Many of these poems make the
time-honoured double gesture of attempting to capture the wonder of
experience while simultaneously lamenting language’s limitations. The greater immediacy with which
small children encounter the world is desirable, but so is capturing
experience in words, no matter how difficult a task that can be.
“Windmill Hymns” (2-3), for instance, recalls the
Romantic fascination with ruins epitomized by Wordsworth’s “Tintern
Abbey,” yet Groarke’s poem balances imagination with realistic
observation. While her
speaker wishes to “lay my face against the stone; let ivy root in my
teeth; / weather grout my skin” in order to achieve union with a
dilapidated windmill, the poem also invokes the quotidian and the modern:
“what we were after then was a stopgap / for the lives we thought we’d
live, that wouldn’t be banked / in small talk, disappointments, lack of
cash.” As in others of
Groarke’s poems, such as “Ghosts” (1) where the speaker informs us that
there are some truths that only “the children know,” the speaker of
“Windmill Hymns” suggests that children have an inarticulate yet superior
understanding of what lies just beyond our perceptual reach: “our way of
holding on, of saying, ‘We’ve stayed too long’, / is like the way children
have of stopping play / to stand stock-still under the whir of starlings’
hide-and-seek” (3).
Groarke’s style exhibits a similar love-hate
relationship with Romantic poetics.
She adopts the idioms of “common life” in order to balance her more
fanciful and abstract passages, a practice called for by Wordsworth in his
Preface to Lyrical Ballads, but, unlike Wordsworth and Coleridge,
she does not deliberately use archaic poetic forms, language or content
for their own sake. Instead,
she gives her poems currency by including references to such pop culture
icons as Coke, Blondie, The Clash and even Yu-Gi-Oh cards. In addition, unlike some of
the Romantic poets, Groarke is able to laugh at herself, and acknowledges
that life rarely brooks pretence.
She therefore makes excellent use of bathos to deflate some overly
fanciful conceits, as when “local lads with slingshots / and deadeyes see
to” (3) smashing the windows of the old windmill in “Windmill Hymns.” This skilful balancing of serious
and light tones, combined with a similar alternation between elevated
rhetoric and plain speech, gives the poems a freshness that rarely
fails.
ome of the most memorable
pieces in the collection suggest the interconnectedness of people and
things through spatial images of reflected light, drifting music or
running water. Significantly,
these connections are depicted through phenomena that evade our grasp, are
ephemeral and fleeting, yet whose effects are meaningful. The river described in “The Local
Accent” (8), for instance,
announces
itself in elision, as though everything
unsaid could
still bed down in depth and unison,
underwriting
words for going on and every other way
in and out of this one place.
he ability of the
river to assuage social tension is suspect in this passage, but its
connective quality is indubitable.
In Juniper Street’s longest and most memorable poem,
“Athlones” (9-14), the River Shannon, Ireland’s longest, is attributed a
similar linking function, even where the parties connected would rather
not be: “a two-faced river, holding the line between / the Pale and
Irishtown, the to-and-fro of siege / or confiscation.”
This poem also offers light as a connecter of
people, places and objects.
“The same light tinkles down through Northgate Street” and “on the
second floor clips the . . . face of a watch, / and sprays shavings of it
down on the highlights of a head / just then emerging from Estelle’s
Salon” (11). In this and
other striking images, light is reflected from surface to surface,
irrespective of the ages, financial situations or political leanings of
the people whom it strikes.
The implication of this poem is that an appreciation of natural
beauty can mediate faction by emphasizing shared experience, but,
thankfully, this idealistic solution to Ireland’s
history of violence is only tentatively proffered.
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Aside from a few weaker poems, such as “Slow Set” (18), which takes
a sentimental and nostalgic turn toward its end, and the short pieces
“Footnotes” (25) and “Acknowledgements” (50), which are somewhat flimsy,
Juniper
Street is a collection of mature
poems. There is wit to be
found, as in “Parnell” (26), which makes a spatial conceit of alternate
pronunciations of the title character’s name, and in “Transatlantic” (44),
which develops a solar conceit that recalls Donne in its sustain and
subtlety. Above all, however,
in these poems bells and whistles give way to rich sound, careful detail
and wise observation.
