Groarke was born in Mostrim in the Irish midlands in 1964, and attended Trinity College, Dublin, and University College, Cork. She has published five collections of poetry with the Gallery Press (and by Wake Forest University Press in the United States): Shale (1994), Other People’s Houses (1999), Flight (2002), Juniper Street (2006) and Spindrift (2009). She is also the author of a translation of the eighteenth-century Irish poem Lament for Art O’Leary (Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire) (Gallery Books, 2008).