As well as conducting a master class for creative writing students on the MA and PhD programmes at the IIML, the acclaimed writer will read her poems and talk about her work alongside 2015 IIML Teaching Fellow—Cliff Fell—at the Wellington City Gallery.
Ms Groarke is one of Ireland’s most versatile and gifted new generation poets and is the author of six collections of poems, says Mr Fell.
“The IIML is delighted that Wellington audiences will have this opportunity to experience Vona’s work in person. She writes poetry that is alert to minutiae of language and yet invested with a transformative power.”
Ms Groarke’s work is noted for its powerful music and formal accomplishment and has been recognised with many prizes, including the Brendan Behan Memorial Award, the Hennessy Award, The Michael Hartnett Award, the Forward Prize, and the Strokestown International Poetry Award.
“Often located in domestic interiors, or landscapes that shimmer with liminal beauty, hills that seem to anchor the sky, piers and jetties that are jumping off points into a luminous lyricism, her poems become marvellous metaphors for the intensity of physical experience, pulsing with a lively spirit and sense of mystery and wonder,” says Mr Fell.
Her 2009 volume Spindrift was nominated for the 2010 Irish Times Poetry Award and selected as a Poetry Book Society recommendation, as was her 2014 collection, X.
Ms Groarke also translates from the Irish language. In 2008, Gallery Books published Lament for Art O’Leary, her version of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill’s 18th century Irish poem, ‘Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire’.
In 2010, Ms Groarke was elected to Aosdána—the Irish arts collective—and she has been a co-holder of the Heimbold Chair of Irish Studies at Villanova University in Philadelphia and has taught at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. She now teaches at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom.
Vona Groarke will be reading at the City Gallery in Wellington, at 12.15pm on Thursday 21 May. Entry is free.