Vona Groarke's 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 It includes poems about relationships (some playful some soured) and others that are fixed on public, historical reference points. It concludes with more personal attentions. This book ranges from the witty, almost epigrammatic and "Open House and ", through some richly suppressed narratives such as and "Domestic Arrangements and " to the more somber registers of and "Holiday Home and ". her first collection, Shale (available from Dufour), won the Brendan Behan Memorial Award in 1995.