7 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Vona Groarke: ‘I don't usually read for comfort. I read poetry for excitement and risk. Novels for company. Biography for nosiness'
Vona Groarke is the new Ireland Professor of Poetry, until 2028. Her ninth poetry collection is Infinity Pool, published in May by The Gallery Press. She has taught at the University of Manchester since 2007 and is writer-in-residence at St John's College, Cambridge, and with the Sligo Yeats Society. Hereafter: The Telling Life of Ellen O'Hara won the 2024 Michel Deon Prize. She lives in Co Sligo.
The books by your bedside? The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck, The Summer Book by Tove Jansson, Seduction and Betrayal by Elizabeth Hardwick, Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton, Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst, and Sara Baume's Seven Steeples. You'd almost think prose sends me to sleep, were it not for Louise Gluck's Poems 1962-2020. And Karen Solie's Wellwater. That covers a poetic multitude.
