Since her earliest poems, Vona Groarke's exploration of what it is to create meaning in the world has highlighted the importance of the place of her speaking subject and its relationship to the cultural moment out of which she writes. Her philosophical enquiries are always aware of that subject's location in time and space – their moment in history, their place of birth and belonging. These are not elements that contain or limit Groarke's poetics, but rather provide the creative moment from which complex investigations unfold. Though many of her poems have an identifiably Irish setting and material, Groarke does not see herself as an ‘Irish poet’ and resists a single cultural location as a central enquiry of the poetry. America, in landscape and language, is glimpsed fleetingly in poems from the period, first in Juniper Street (2006) and then in Spindrift (2009); Northern England emerges in Spindrift and X (2013). Though these collections see Groarke extending her versatility of form, it is her treatment of time that is especially noteworthy. As well as mediating between present and past, these poems also offer important insights into Groarke's negotiation of the moment of experience and its assimilation in the finished poem.

The relationship between experience and aesthetics is a complex and interesting one in Groarke's work as a whole. Since her third collection, Flight (2002), there has been an intensification of her engagement with existential concerns, yet this process has occurred without loss of the vividly specific world for which her work has been justly praised. In Juniper Street, experience remains an important formative element, yet, though the specifics of Groarke's life in America shape her art, these are never straightforwardly personal lyrics. While the immediacy of experience is rendered directly in language, it is also transformed by it, so that a significant temporal gap opens between experience and representation. Time itself becomes a key concern: so that a transnational reading of her poems must take into account not only the visual and linguistic inflections of American and British cultures that emerge in her work but rather her extended preoccupation with ideas of the secure and the transitory – a concern that has been intensified in X, her most recent volume.