So It Goes: Poems [Paperback]

Eamon Grennan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 1995

Eamon Grennan is a writer who is able to find sensuality in the small gestures of the world--in the look of a firefly, the suond of a step, the tastes of a meal, the rhythm in things. A poet of immediacy and surprise, Grennan can turn our eye to objects caught in the light and suddenly transformed.

In So It Goes, Grennan maps a spiritual geography for the middle of life's journey: ahead he sees the dark thickets of mortality; behind, the vulnerability of childhood. This is a brilliant collection--at once celebratory and elegiac--by a poet whose work has been described as the "verbal equivalent of 17th century Dutch paintings."

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

"There comes in middle life a moment/when everything is very solid/and seems to stand foursquare/in its own hard, uncompromising light." Having come to his middle years, Grennan is pensive and expansive. His hard-won maturity and insight enable him to cast light on the shadows and reveal the everyday wonders hidden there. With logic, plain, honest language, precision, and clarity, the author presents a world that has always been but we have rarely noticed. His appreciation of the small things makes these poems memorable: "The boy is on the verge of walking/past me, about to go where I can't imagine..." In this case, it is a statue ("a summary of boys, no one in particular..."), but it might as easily have been a young son setting out?his first steps and a life in front of him. Midlife is often viewed as a time of crisis: "What you see is that there's no second time." To Grennan it is an opportunity to pause and take account. Both his example and his poems are recommended for poetry collections.?Louis McKee, Painted Bride Arts Ctr., Philadelphia
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Grennan, an Irish native long resident at Vassar College, is at the top of his form. His subjects are common to poets his age: loss of parents, worries about the loss of powers, the small joys of a happy life. What distinguishes his takes on them is his fierce sensuality and his narrative ease. In a poem about his mother's death, he moves us through the day of "her waking and last exposure," which includes the very moment when he discovers that "the livid veins and that bright traveller, the blood, / have settled for snow at last." This is mature poetry, both in subject and in language. Patricia Monaghan

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Product Details

• Paperback: 90 pages
• Publisher: Graywolf Press (November 1, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1555972322
• ISBN-13: 978-1555972325
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.3 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,966,727 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Grennan's poetic concerns are well displayed here., May 31, 1998

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A Customer - See all my reviews

This review is from: So It Goes: Poems (Paperback)

Having read strong work by Grennan in The New Yorker magazine in recent years, I decided to try him at book length. This handsomely printed trade paperback offers a large selection of poems, most of them published in the most distinguished poetry magazines in America (one is also from Irish Times). There is no questioning Grennan's skill as a wordsmith; his turns of phrase evoke scenes with a hallucinatory accuracy. The book as a whole is rather heavy, though, because the majority of it recounts the writer's sad struggle with his mother's slow death. A Wordsworthian at heart, Grennan recollects in tranquillity the incidents that most struck his senses. For my money (the book costs $14.00), the best material here are his poems on animals ("Towards Dusk the Porcupine," "Bat," and "Horses," the last of which is the best in the book) and "Angel Looking Away," an extraordinary blending of a Florentine Renaissance bas-relief with a 20th century scene of political torture. That is Grennan doing what other poets can or do not.