This first major collection of Eamon Grennan's work ranges from delicate early lyrics to poems that explore in larger meditations the complex realms of family, the natural world, and love. Throughout, the poetry is marked by what Grennan refers to in one poem as "a fathoming/depth of attention anchored in the heart." Edward Hirsch has said that "as a poem of dailiness, Grennan tries to fix and nail things down even as the world melts before him." It is this sharp and profound double awareness of the solidity and fluency of things that is Grennan's most recognizable signature. These are poems that in the minute fidelity of their images and the refined mastery of their language prompt us to experience at a higher frequency the world we mostly take for granted.
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Editorial Reviews
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At its best, poetry paints life's briefest moments in language that redefines them in context of the world's larger canvas. Eamon Grennan's poetry composes these moments into masterpieces of color and light. This major collection combines the best of his previous work.
For example, in "Compass Reading" a cat killing a bird leads to a contemplation of death's inevitability: "I imagine / its first arrested screech, the cat / tasting a salt smear of blood / across tongue and teeth: she knows / the ripe smell of death ... wherever my ears go, they hear / nothing but clocks ticking, each tick / a distinct penetration of air, a pulsebeat / greeting its own goodbye." In "Oasis," a pool of water provides both joy and reflection. The poem is cast in short lines that each holds an image of water's pleasures, such as "you keep saying / its wedded syllables / as if they were enough" and "it fills, overspills / the heart in your mouth / like another life."
Grennan's exquisite poems give this bustling world of ours the luxury of pause, like sitting on a rooftop on a warm, starry night. You know that you may have been here before, but you've never seen stars quite like this.
From Publishers Weekly
"To love the scrubbed exacitudes/ and the dimmer thing/ that shivers at the brink" is Grennan's project, and this collection spanning 15 years demonstrates the Irish emigre's developing capacity for attending closely to physical experience. In "Oasis," for example, we find "the felt/ luxury of shadow, its way/ of slowing you down to know/ what flesh is again," or, as in "Winter" we learn to "Pity the fox, the melacholy badger,/ the fieldmouse clean as a snowflake,/ shivering and praying in the flayed hedges." Here, lessons of compassion arrive through the body, though a lover can still be "cool as a handful of scallions,/ your only warm part the tongue/ in the live cave of your mouth." Grennan's most marked influences are Seamus Heaney and the late Patrick Kavanagh, Irish poets whose works linger over daily life and the apparently mundane: parents, children, marriage?and over the natural world. Occasionally, Grennan expressly reaches further outward, as when addressing Northern Ireland's "troubles" in the remarkable "Angel Looking Away": "On Pisano's pulpit the angel/ is turned away in sorrow/...and in the interrogation centre/ a man has turned/ away from the polished steel table/ on which a man?/calloused tallow soles/ stretched toward us?is twitching/ as a live wire/ wide as its own glitter/ kisses the eye of his penis." In Grennan's best poems, and there are many in this collection, the precision of his observations renders the embodied lives of others with gripping lucidity.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
All About Relationships Grennan style,
By A Customer
This review is from: Relations: New and Selected Poems (Paperback)
Tour the innermost depths of your feelings about your child, spouse, and lover vis a vis Eamon Grennan's sensitive eye. No one sees the complexities of human relationships in quite the same way as this Irish poet and professor. His eye for detail is amazing and his heart is always willing. Some of these poems are brief moments in time, trying desparately to capture a certain feeling state in words that most of us are barely conscious of. Others are more drawn out and playful, as if the poet is experimenting with relationships, trying to bring us into his, knowing that we either will or will not relate. Grennan dares to explore such complex feeling states as the husband witnessing his wife breast feeding their infant, or the departure of an adolescent son. He hones in on the scene at hand with an uncanny look at the human interaction and the backdrop of weather, or highway lights on a dark night. Just as the poems get intense, Grennan comforts us with a ditty and we move on. I, for one, like the intensity of the epiphanistic style he is known for and could do without the lighter poems which he interjects, but, all in all, any English major or student of psychology will absolutely devour these sensational poems.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of a handful of the world's greatest poets!,
This review is from: Relations: New and Selected Poems (Paperback)
Well, here it is. Eamon Grennan's life's work. These poems written over an approximately 20 year period form the basis of a genuine career in poetry. Taken together with his translation of Leopardi from Italian, and original essays, it appears to be an especially valuable and admirable one. I would even go so far as to say he is one of the half-dozen greatest living poets. One of the main reasons for this is because he cannot be easily categorized. Certainly he is part of the extraordinary contemporary band of bards from his native land Ireland, who has also successfully assimilated himself here in America. But he is also an ORIGINAL. He may be easy to overlook or even condescend to--but so was Gerard Manley Hopkins for many years. And Christina Rossetti, Stephen Spender and Thom Gunn have still not received everything they're due. The Dutch painters, a main source of inspiration for Grennan, didn't clobber anybody with their technique and opinions either. "Woman with Pearl Necklace (Vermeer)," which appears in the New Poems section of the book, is the masterwork of his dedication to that school; it begins: "Since he painted her, she will always be putting this pearl necklace on...." The poem is as fully-realized and illuminating--and timeless--as the painting. Right from the beginning of the volume, the first poem, "Facts of Life, Ballymoney," one gets the idea this poet is after some kind of personal grace, rather than trendiness or easy solutions. ("I would like to let things be:/ The rain comes down on the roof/ The small birds come to the feeder/ The waves come slowly up to the strand.") And I can't help wondering if Grennan doesn't attract more attention because he accepts his place as a voluble part of the larger world, without losing his honest sense of self--which sometimes means expressing the darker emotions, especially present, with different kinds of shading, in the most recent work. It's as if he somehow miraculously kept fresh in mind a student's passions for poetry, or Jude the Obscure's feelings of awe and modesty instead of puffing himself up in later life. As If It Matter is a favorite book of mine (although Grennan arguably gets richer and more complex in So It Goes.) When I re-read the book, I don't crave anything else. See: "Two Climbing", "Circlings," "Walk, Night Falling, Memory of My Father", "Sea Dog", "Breakfast Room", and the list goes on. "The Cave Painters" ("We'll never know if they worked in silence/ like people praying--the way our monks/ illuminated their own dark ages...") is one of my very favorite poems. I get shivers just thinking about it. I have found that I have unconsciously memorized many of the poems in this collection; they are close to my heart. I have had the pleasure of meeting and knowing Eamon, and I find him as unspoiled and generous in real life. Like the wonderful poet Jean Valentine, Grennan may be criticized for, or even feel guilty about, not being more explicitly political. But his (and her)concern bypasses and subverts various camps and allegiances, although he cetainly keeps well-informed, to create a deeper dialectic. I really believe in this poet, I thoroughly enjoying reading him, and that's all I need.
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