The Interview : Vona Groarke

Rachna Singh, Editor, The Wise Owl talks to Vona Groarke, one of Ireland’s most acclaimed poets, known for her luminous precision of language and her exploration of the spaces poems make for themselves. Her ninth poetry collection and fifteenth book, Infinity Pool (Gallery Press, 2025), has been shortlisted for the 2025 T. S. Eliot Prize.

Groarke has published fifteen books, including nine poetry collections with the Gallery Press: Shale (1994), Other People’s Houses (1999), Flight (2002), Juniper Street (2006), Spindrift (2009), X (2014), Double Negative (2019), Link: Poet and World (2021), and Infinity Pool (2025). Her Selected Poems (2016) won the Pigott Prize for Best Irish Poetry Collection, while Four Sides Full (2016) offered a striking meditation on art frames and the act of seeing.

Groarke has received numerous awards, including the 2024 Michel Déon Award for Non-Fiction, for Hereafter: The Telling Life of Ellen O’Hara, a multi-genre book about Irish women emigrants to New York in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, which arose out of her time as a Fellow of the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, 2018-19.

A member of Aosdána (the Irish Academy of the Arts) since 2010, she was elected a Fellow of the U.K.’s Royal Society of Literature in 2024. She has taught creative writing at the University of Manchester since 2007 and is the current Writer in Residence at St John’s College, Cambridge.

In September 2025, she was inaugurated by Irish President Michael D. Higgins as Ireland Professor of Poetry, 2025-28.

Thank you Vona for talking with The Wise Owl. We are indeed honoured that you have accepted our request for an interview.

RS: Infinity Pool feels like a meditation on thresholds, where language slips into an image or an image ‘bleeds’ back into a word, where sea slips into sky or poem into consciousness. How do you navigate this liminal space as a poet?

VG: Metaphor, that most crucial of all poetic tools, is all about moving across thresholds: you literally describe one thing as another, transgressing boundaries of definition in the interest of more expansive and illuminating description. ‘Things as they are’ is tricky material, as the external world is always filtered through sensibility and idiosyncracy. My reality may not align exactly (or even vaguely) with yours, and poetry is surely the attempt to apply language to one’s perceived reality, the better to understand and the sharper to experience it. Forbidding slippage, barring this ‘bleeding’, would surely lead to depleted poetry, and who wants to write or read that?

RS:  Your poems often test the elasticity of form and meaning , it sometimes ‘resists’ its boundaries and sometimes ‘leans’ into them. How do you decide when a poem has reached its own limit, or when it’s asking to spill beyond it?

VG: I appreciate the watery terminology but I’m not sure I’ve experienced a poem ever asking to spill beyond its own limit. Beyond my limit, sure. I’ve known poems to defy my own understanding, and sometimes I have to trust that they know what they’re doing. But not always: sometimes I have to allow for the possibility that they might be talking gibberish. My job is to try, as earnestly as I can, to distinguish between a poem that owes something to me and/or my life, and the (very rare) poem that’s more determined to buck my expectations of it. It’s useful to me to remember that such an occurrence is possible, even if I don’t often encounter it.

RS: There’s a striking sense of dialogue between perception and imagination in Infinity Pool: a luggage carousel can become a site of reckoning, the Atlantic an actor. What draws you to transforming the ordinary into the metaphysical ?

VG: Life. Are such transformational impulses not the very stuff of being alive and on the look out for clues as to any possible meaning to the extraordinary (even, let’s say, miraculous) fact of it?

RS: The Infinity Pool is a powerful metaphor, that single edge where the water seems to drop away, a visual trick that connects what is near with what lies beyond. How does this image mirror your understanding of the poem’s capacity to hold, and also to dissolve, meaning?

VG: The infinity pool is all kinds of a visual trick, connecting (apparently) the interior and exterior, the contained and the boundless, the clearly defined and the somewhat ineffable. This description seems to me to also apply to the poem, moving as it does between the personal and its communicable interiority. The poem that is only personal is likely to have limited appeal, whereas the poem that is personal in a recognisable way, and that offers that to the reader in a way that prioritises the idea of a even moment’s communion, stands a stronger chance of succeeding with a reader who neither knows (nor, quite likely, cares all that much about) the poet. I value poetry that seems to spill beyond its own containing form to hold at its core the possibility of being true to the personal and also to more general experience. Just as the infinity pool has to appear as a fully-functioning pool before it can be believed as a kind of visual trick, the poem has to succeed as very well crafted language before its meaning seems to begin to matter.

RS:  You’ve written across genres, be it poetry, essay or hybrid nonfiction. Your book  Hereafter: The Telling Life of Ellen O'Hara in fact uses several genres (poetry, prose, history and images) to tell its story.  How does genre serve you as a creative instrument rather than a constraint?

VG: Hereafter: The Telling Life of Ellen O'Hara does indeed come at its narrative through various means. These were all strategic choices, a way of telling a story that was distinctive and that might adequately account for the book’s blend of recorded fact, historical interpretation and imaginative conjecture. It was an experiment for me, and arose out of the material I was dealing with rather than a set of decisions I made into which I moulded my research. Because Ellen’s story was, in my argument, representative (so few facts about her particular life exist that I chose instead to frame her as someone whose story could be used as exemplative of the lives of women of the time, who had undertaken similar emigrant journeys from Ireland to New York), I had to find ways to incorporate the evidence for that argument. The best way I found to do it was to use actual historical accounts, left unadulterated. This was a decision not altogether of a different order to the kinds of decision one makes in every new poem about form and tone, two key elements of what we term ‘genre’. And it’s in that choosing of form and tone (and linguistic register) that a poem becomes possible and comes into its own. Form is a useful constraint, a means for a poet to come to define and understand her material, or it is no help at all.

RS: The Telling Life of Ellen O’Hara used archival history to reimagine women’s lives in 19th-century New York. Infinity Pool, in contrast, feels unanchored in time, fluid and luminous, dropping away like the fourth wall of the pool. How does your sense of time, be it historical, personal, or poetic, shape the textures and themes of your writing?

VG: I don’t really understand time at all, and wouldn’t ever claim to. My sense of it is somewhat foggy and largely ephemeral. I wear an old-fashioned watch that does nothing but tell me what time it is in any given moment – that seems enough to ask of any piece of careful, minutely-calibrated machinery, (even the lyric poem). I prefer a poem to work like my watch, and here I’m thinking of those lines from Yeats’s  ‘Adam’s Curse’:

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I said, ‘A line will take us hours maybe;

Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,   

Our stitching and unstitching has been naught. 

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That idea of there being a kind of to-and-fro between the timeless and the instantaneous is helpful in any poem that needs to be true to its moment but also wants to push past it to claim some kind of extensive or more general permanence.

RS:  As Ireland’s current Professor of Poetry, you occupy a role that connects personal creative practice with public cultural dialogue. How do you envisage the place of poetry in a world where poetic attention feels increasingly fragmented?

VG: Every time you publish you connect personal practice with  public cultural dialogue; you throw the output of three or more years into the public cultural fray. The Professorship is an extension of that, I suppose, but it’s not as if I represent all Irish poetry any more than a single athlete, for example, represents the full span of her sport. If I thought I had to, I’d never get out of bed. Equally, if I thought I had to envisage the place of poetry in any world, I’d probably never write again. My job is to write the best poems I can and to promote poetry as a way to remember and galvanize language as an art form. Is poetic attention more increasingly fragmented than it’s ever been? There’s a plurality of voices and approaches, sure, but that’s hardly new. And even if it is, are we quite sure that’s a bad thing? Surely we don’t want a sanctioned set of poetic themes or poetic identities? The problem is that if the centre truly cannot hold, any agreement about what might constitute a good poem might seem impossible.  But I suspect it’s only bad poets who try to pass off bad poems as being better than they are. Happily, I believe there will always be poets of merit able to tell the difference between a good poem and its terrible nemesis. Editors, I’m not so sure about, not when editors of reputable presses publish what they must know is bad poetry simply because the ‘poets’ have significant social media followings and will, therefore, sell books – this is a very damaging trend. These are nearly always ‘poets’ whose work seems to me to be without literary merit or, indeed, merit of any kind other than financial. This is very bad news for our art. We must resist the trite, sentimental, rhetorical or cack-handedly made if the art is to survive and to convince anyone of its own vitality.

RS:  You’ve spoken about art frames in Four Sides Full. You talk about how they both contain and define what we see. If we think of Infinity Pool as a kind of unframing, what happens when the poem refuses to stay within its edges? What new possibilities emerge for you as a poet?

VG: Four Sides Full was my attempt to explore both the art of framing and the experience of middle-ness, of how we understand so much of our lives by constructing imaginative frames around experience as a way of determining it to be ‘other’, the better to handle it. Obviously, a poem is framed by white space on the page. And the white space itself is framed by the page, and the page by the book, and the book by the not-book, and so on. I’m not sure I care all that much about ‘unframing’: I’m far too interested in thinking about these frames, and in deploying different framing devices to try to explore and manage my material. I like to play with edges in my work, both in terms of line endings and also in terms (especially in Infinity Pool) of the idea of a poem that appears to extend beyond its own metaphysical terms to drop its theatrical fourth wall and directly address the reader. That’s probably not something I’d do in every poem (it could become a gimmick, and quickly; or could easily become annoying for a reader who just wants the poem to be itself and not to be grabbing at the reader, needily, all the while), but the visual image of the book’s title trope seemed to facilitate it, for once.

Thank you so much Vona for taking time out of your busy schedule to respond to The Wise Owl’s questions. We wish you the very best in all your literary and creative pursuits.

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Thank you!