Hereafter

An Irish Times and Irish Independent book of the year ~2022

A groundbreaking way of investigating a traumatic period in history, not only Irish history, but American history too. ~Colm Tóibín

Hereafter would be heartbreaking if it weren't so beautiful. As it is, it lifts the heart. ~John Banville, author of The Singularities

Hereafter is a mixed-media multi-genre tour-de-force. With poetry, prose, photographs, and a treasure trove of facts and artifacts pulled from the archives, Vona Groarke conjures the spirit of a woman she never met: Ellen O’Hara Grady, her mother’s beloved grandmother, missing for half a lifetime across the Atlantic Ocean. “Story is company,” Groarke writes; her mosaic of a narrative draws readers around a metaphoric hearth that warms the soul. ~Megan Marshall, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Margaret Fuller: A New American Life and Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast

A glowingly beautiful book about absence (and about absence becoming presence), this engagement with a ‘boxy, skeptical’ woman moves from plainness to poignancy, from groundedness to grace. It’s the story of a life but also a story of storymaking, written with immense skill and a living sense of writerly tact. ~Joseph O’Connor, author of Star of the Sea

Keats wrote that ‘a man’s life of any worth is a continual allegory.’ So too a woman’s. A conjuring, a searching, a haunting, a documenting, an imagining: Hereafter is a singular work of archival poetics and sympathetic vision. Speculative yet grounded in documents and historical research, this book draws on all the poet’s prodigious gifts—her formal inventiveness, historical sensibility, ethical acuity, linguistic brio. Vivifying the lives of young Irish immigrant women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focusing on her own great-grandmother’s elusive presence in the historical record and in family memory, Groarke has brilliantly made of this ‘an intimating life,’ full of sensory detail and surprising transnational currents. Hereafter strikingly suggests en route how the work of Irish women abroad was crucial to the formation of the Irish state; it is a tour-de-force and also points to new horizons for life-writing in/as poetry. ~Maureen N. McLane, author of My Poets

A chance discovery in the archives of the New York Public Library was the seed for this book, and for that we should be thankful, because what has taken root with Hereafter is something remarkable. Vona Groarke, among the most brilliant poets writing today, gifts to her subject, Ellen O’Hara, the power of poetry, and in their joined hands is a powerful story indeed, freeing up the sonnet form so that it not only accommodates but ignites the rich and fascinating specifics of a private and important life. There has been nothing like this from an Irish writer before; it is a thrilling and beautiful creation. ~Belinda McKeon, author of Tender

As it imagines one woman’s life, this genre-bending book probes the nature of family and belonging and the profound ways ordinary immigrant women changed history on both sides of the Atlantic. Intelligent, searching, and warmly rendered. ~Kirkus Reviews

A striking tapestry woven of research and speculation. ~Brendan Daly, Business Post

A beautifully distinctive exercise in imaginative empathy. Groarke’s writing is intimate — and impeccably honed. Hereafter is a fitting expression of gratitude, a reclamation or rectification as well as an attempt to assemble and understand Ellen’s life. ~Joanne Hayden, Independent.ie

In Hereafter: The Telling Life of Ellen O’Hara, the poet Vona Groarke traces, through a blend of poetry and prose, the life of her grand-mother, who emigrated from Sligo to New York in 1882 to work as a servant. Groarke’s lyrical act of historical investigation will surely become a classic of Irish literature. ~Frances Wilson, The Spectator

A groundbreaking blend of history, poetry, and prose, a triumph of negative capability. This is a rich, rewarding, and heartbreaking read. Groarke restores not just Ellen, but all the other women who ‘left to live in other peoples’ houses.’ ~Martina Evans, The Irish Times

Groarke not only exquisitely explores the nature of belonging in one family but also how Irish immigrant women transformed history both at home and abroad. ~Janet Somerville, Toronto Star

[Y]ou should grab a copy of Vona Groarke’s Hereafter: The Telling Life of Ellen O’Hara. It is an inventive, fascinating twist on the life story of one so-called Irish 'biddy.' It is also a collage of poetry, history, and memoir. Just like George Saunders re-invented Honest Abe with his dazzling 2017 book Lincoln in the Bardo, Groarke gives us a new way to think about immigrant women, from her great-grandmother to herself. ~Tom Deignan, IrishCentral