Other People's Houses

In his oddly prophetic review of Vona Groarke's Shale in Poetry Ireland Review, Anthony Roche appreciated 'a strikingly individual sensibility rich enough to inhabit a hundred empty rooms'. Her 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 It includes poems about relationships (some playful, some soured) and others ?xed on public, historical reference points.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 sombre registers of 'Holiday Home'. Other People's Houses enhances Caitríona Clutterbuck's impression in Oxford Poetry of 'a remarkably assured' and 'beautifully regulated' voice.