Groarke - Four Sides Full: a personal essay

Four Sides Full, an autobiographical essay, filled with insight and honesty and sharp intelligence.

Colm Toibn, Irish Independent Books of the Year 2016

In her intriguing personal essay, Vona Groarke plays not with the painting but with the frame itself. What, really, does it define? How well does it live up to that promise to separate art from life, the image freighted with meaning from the threat of meaninglessness that surrounds it?

The essay is a kind of disguised memoir, in which a consideration of the history and purpose of frames is also a way to deal with what is beyond the frame of its philosophical argument: the poets own life and especially the breakup of her marriage.

And though frames promise to divide art from life, life itself is always framed. Our bodies are frames, and so are our homes. We look at the world through windows and television screens, phones and laptops, all of which frame the images they present.

What makes Four Sides Full ultimately as moving as it is erudite and elegant is that it, too, spills out of its frame. It is not, after all, a wall that keeps whats inside captive. It is, rather, a safe space in which Groarke can explore, with delicacy and restraint, the pain of lost love. The record contained in the family photographs that used to hang on her walls once framed her life. And I dismantled it to move here, to learn to live alone. No wonder I cant bear to look them in the eye. But sometimes, as this beautiful little book shows, it is things seen from the corner of the eye, almost out of the frame, that move us most.

Fintan OToole, The Irish Times

Gallery Books

Editor Peter Fallon

FOUR SIDES FULL

for John McAuliffe
and for Helen OLeary

The frame I choose for this day

is made of feathers and froth.

As though someone carved

faintly decorous clouds

onto a pale grey sky:

this, my all-day canvas,

yet to be painted on.

A rowdy sun like an offer of love

framed with the windows air quotes.

The wall is in step with the picture rail.

God knows where this is headed.

An afternoon evenly framed in bronze

like a skin colour given a name.

And every promise ever made

was framed in a yellow frame.

Gesso to neutralize the linen,

gilt to douse the grain.

Run your eyes along the edge of me,

see where the world begins.

Rooms with nothing on the walls:

who can tell what theyre thinking?

A picture slips infinitesimally.

A knot cosies up to thin air.

The picture rail without pictures

has to grow old alone.

Frame, mount, art:

yes, no, maybe?

Me, ferreting for little poems

as the paintbrush does

for paint.

I love you baby and I always will
ever since I put your picture in a frame.

Tom Waits, Picture in a Frame,
Mule Variations, 1999

The frame separates the artwork from the world around. Whats inside is art, whats outside is not simple, isnt it? As if around every experience there would be some kind of transition, some way of saying, Prepare yourself, there will be a crossing. So draw breath.

The image proposes an imagined world. The surrounding is reality; it is where we are when we look at the image, the air we breathe, the room we stand in, the wall were allowed to touch. The frame is the transition from imagined to real. Thats a big responsibility when you think about it. No surprise then that the frame sometimes nudges towards excessive ornament, as if by being too much it can at least be sure of itself.

The mount confirms it. Wiped of noise and meaning, of business and intent, the mount is a meditative space. The mount will see you clear. You set aside your knots of living, shed your duties and concerns, you take a breath, dip your mind in its clean space, to emerge on the inner side of it. You have been prepared.