Alison Brackenbury reviews Juniper Street by Vona Groarke

There is a street in every small town where everyone once lived, and knew each other, and the baker’s van came each Friday.  I knew one such: Silver Street, in Barnetby, in the North Midlands, whose exiled daughters meet in London bars to plot their impossible return.  There are many streets, too, in poetry:  Douglas Dunn’s youthful Terry Street, the blackened street of Eliot’s ‘Preludes’, ‘infinitely gentle/ Infinitely suffering’.  If I muse, or meander, it is because I am still seduced by the haunting, time-defying poems of Vona Groarke’s Juniper Street.

But Groarke, who, the cover tells me, was ‘born in the Irish midlands… now lives in North Carolina’, is not a street pedlar of transatlantic nostalgia.  Her long poem, ‘Athlones’, celebrates, in long luxuriant lines, a lost river’s light:

The same light tinkles down through Northgate Street
like someone running late, all streaming hair
and necklaces that chink like moorings.

She is affectionately alert to the names which pack her streets

                                          the highlights of a head
just then emerging from Estelle’s Salon.

Groake is equally attentive to the suggestive music of their speech:

                                            the tune of what falls
between See you tomorrow and Oh, by the way…

But why am I suddenly alerted by a detail, ‘the man angling a suitcase’, to an echo of violence, ‘smithereens/ of coloured glass’, to the final threat (or promise) of ‘release’, as the poem’s street takes a last slant turn? 

I will freely admit that, with my average knowledge of Irish geography and history, I worry that I may have been left at a slant to the full meaning of ‘Athlones’.    The writer of the cover notes skilfully guides strangers in Groarke’s streets by revealing the destination of the rich poem ‘Smithereens’.  Its opening displays Groarke’s exemplary, lucid simplicity as the children

          “hardly care: they are busy spilling buckets
of gold all over the afternoon”

Then the acute, never unkindly, detailing of her vision: ‘the mams and aunts….put down/ their scandalous magazines and vast, plaid flasks…’

But this poem takes a dizzying turn.  Groarke’s elliptic italics, ‘rowboat, fishing’, are glancing at the murder of Lord Mountbatten.  (I am a late convert to the necessity of footnotes to poems – illuminating as street signs.)  Groarke then swerves to a sensuously realised train journey on ‘crimson plush’ to ‘the very point when all the journeys terminate.’  The poem’s own termination is a word, Indian as Mountbatten’s past, ‘smithereens’.

It could be argued that the poem (like the lit streets of ‘Athlones’) is a warm celebration of life.  But it leaves me with my only reservation about Groake’s mappings of her world:  that they refer evasively to writing and language in a way I find deadening and slightly decadent.  Every ‘I’ in a poem is a persona, and the ‘I’ of the poet can be a particularly narrow one.  At times, in this book, the river with its ‘accent’ and ‘elision’ becomes words.  In Groarke’s deeper art, words become the river.

Her great ally is sound.  The English are, mercifully, an ethnic muddle, but the ear hears boundaries, the voice from a different street.  I hear, in Groake’s work, a spacious music, which I admire immensely, could never replicate and find hard to analyze: a long and variable line, often 5 beat, occasionally reinforced by rhyme: a line which holds off time.  It is a line peculiarly well suited to rendering water:

the slipknot/ of darkness the river ties and unties in the scenes.

It is a line which persuades you that it does not matter how long the poem flows; you are content to follow its winding street to the end.  Groake’s short poems can be as tricky to follow as a back bobbing through the crowd.  But they can also display a wicked humour, as in her spoofed dedications, or turn into a sudden expansive clarity, like the opening out of some of the great Russian lyrics:

what are we to do with so much hope?

Groarke’s sense of generations is almost mythic.  Her children, often unnamed, remain ‘the children’.  She writes history, not anecdote.  ‘Juniper Street’ is her American home, free of the ghosts of Irish violence, where even the melting snow ‘keeps new time’ ‘that would carry us over the tip of all that darkness.’  Words can become a line.  Vona Groarke’s streets become a world.

Juniper Street, Gallery Books, 2006, ISBN 1 85235 398 8

The views expressed by contributors to the reviews section of Poetry Matters are not those of Tower Poetry, or of Christ Church, Oxford, and are solely those of the reviewers.