Description
We are delighted to announce publication of Echo Chamber by Vona Groarke, a set of meditations and reflections in conversation with the shade of T. S. Eliot, and his poems, as encountered during a stay at the Eliot family’s summer house, on the coast of Massachusetts at Gloucester.
How are we to cope with the phenomenon of Eliot? Even more to the point how might one address that coping poetically, in so forbiddingly resonant a location, in such immediate proximity to the poet’s past, hearing:
the groaning heaver of “Dry Salvages”
picking its way up from the shore
through the eye of lawn mowers
and leaf blowers and chain saws …
Vona Groarke shows us how, with all her characteristic brilliance. These highly intelligent poems come at us from intriguing points of the compass, more than a few of them Irish, and ironic. This is a must-have purchase for all admirers of Groarke’s work and all who hope to keep up with what is happening in contemporary Irish poetry.
Contents: ‘I stay here’, ‘Never so simple again’, ‘Annie Dunn’, ‘Listening to Joe Heaney on YouTube at the Eliot House’, ‘Echo Chamber’, ‘Coyote’, ‘Teller’
Clutag Press (2022), 16 pp.
