Infinity Pool by Vona Groarke

Gallery Press. 2025. 64 pages.

Infinity Pool is the ninth poetry collection by Vona Groarke, who is often seen as one of the most important Irish poets writing today (and currently serves as the Ireland Professor of Poetry). The volume begins with a marked emphasis upon the self’s encounter with large spaces and their attendant qualities of brightness, lightness, and expansiveness. The word “soul” is even used, while deft allusions to W. B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney work to situate Groarke in an Irish tradition of writing about the spirit’s association with light and space. She steps into this metaphorical field confidently. The lyrics of Infinity Pool are spare but not quite calligraphic—there is a dialogic element here too—and yet they appear to refuse the gravitational pull of the everyday world.

Groarke has been called oneiric or meditative, yet there is no self-satisfying tricksiness to her visions, which openhandedly invite us in. Her poetic self is masterfully formed as an everyperson placed into utterly specific, even banal situations; she could be any one of us. These poems are centered by the lyrical self, who allows herself to be shot through with external impressions and even to change shape, but stop short of presenting an egotistical sublime. Sometimes the volume’s focus on large spaces becomes a focus on the space of art: one poignant poem, “Nocturne with Ink,” concludes with an image of the poet and a recent love as “moonlight on two / sides of the / one page.” The image is simple yet riddling: Is it an emblem of inspired writing? Of the poet and “someone from the past”? Both?

Groarke has achieved a level of mastery in which such imaginings deftly suggest more than one possible reading without any winking cleverness or undue difficulty. Her use of utterly limpid images (“Lint,” “The Low Road”) recalls Heaney’s challenge to invest the humblest objects with metaphorical weight. Groarke holds our gaze steadily, insisting that we move past late-contemporary skepticism to a condition of readerly trust. We trust the image to hold the weight with which she invests it; we trust that this poet will invest such weight with meaning. Our trust is, indeed, repaid amply in this volume, which contains an abundance of memorable lines and situations. It takes a virtuosic poet to create this effect.

Even novice poetry readers will find themselves captivated by the lucent and lucid imagery of Infinity Pool.

Magdalena Kay
University of Victoria