Other People's Houses

Vona Groarke's second collection uses the image of the house-and houses themselves -- as the setting for the enactment of particular lives. It includes poems about relationships (some playful some soured) and others that are fixed on public, historical reference points. It concludes with more personal attentions. This book ranges from the witty, almost epigrammatic "Open House", through some richly suppressed narratives such as "Domestic Arrangements" to the more somber registers of "Holiday Home". her first collection, Shale (available from Dufour), won the Brendan Behan Memorial Award in 1995.