When pandemic and crisis are the way of the world what’s a poet to do: engage in a combative full lock, or trust the personal to throw light on the public, so something slips between? Vona Groarke's Link (Poet and World) explores the give-and-take between the contemporary lyric and our strangely troubled times. Twenty-six poems and their answering prose pieces (featuring the characters of Poet and World) consider how the news frames a poem, telling its home truths. Spiky, tender and funny, Link offers a new kind of poetry book, as enjoyable as it is daring, as crafty as it is skilled.
Link (Poet and World) is a beautiful and innovative collection: part lyric magic, part conceptual project and part comic relief. Conceived in isolation, and fashioned by uncertainty, Link is a unique, poignant and witty book. — Kathryn Maris, PNR
'Poems that . . . are vital buffers against the many storms outside.'
— Los Angeles Review of Books
In Vona Groarke’s Link (Poet and World) (Gallery, €12.50), 26 lyric poems are partnered by 26 prose conversations between the Poet and the World, a devilish character who constantly wrong-foots the Poet . . . 'Link is experimental and witty, full of Groarke’s signature intelligent exactitude.' — Martina Evans, The Irish Times
