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Still Life with Waterfall: Poems

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In Eamon Grennan's Still Life with Waterfall, agitated swoops and scuttlings of animal life are stilled in a language as sensuous as the bright colors of Bonnard's "Sunset" (on the book's cover). Grennan's observations of the natural world are inextricably bound to the ineluctable experiences of death and loss, resulting in a poetry that gnaws its way toward basic realizations about what it means to be a human animal. On a primal level, we identify with the rage for survival in the plights of the carnivorous marsh hawk and sparrowhawk (in the book's first and last poems respectively), as well as the pathos of the "stopped robin" in "Detail," and the flight instinct of the deer in "Grid," who "stares till he sees what you are, then... he's dolphining green waves/ to a safer distance." Grennan also contemplates animal instinct in search of a model for more complex human behaviors. For example, "Up Against It" is a poem that functions on both a literal and metaphorical level, in which frustrated bees who "cannot understand the window... fling their bodies against... [the] fact of glass--and can only go on/ making the sound that tethers their electric/ fury to what's impossible."

So many of these poems speak to the way in which fundamental human impulses are felt and remembered not only by the brain, but by the body. Weather fluctuations are experienced both internally and externally. "To Grasp the Nettle" treats the speaker's hands almost as the subject of the poem, endowing them with their own memory of lost love, "the way they burned/ to find the cool indented shell of flesh/ at the base of her spine, how they cupped themselves/ to hold her head, feeling its weight and bones." In keeping with his deeply sensual consciousness, Grennan's long sentences, rich with assonance and consonance, give his poetry a slow, lulling, lyrical quality, so that language is eroticized no less passionately than the human body.

A palpable sense of loss haunts the text; rather than write around it as some poets might, Grennan writes through and about the pain of loss, even adopting a lexicon in which words like "asunder," "amputation," and "silence," recur throughout the poems. In addition, there is a formal recurrence of 13-line sonnets, each a kind of truncation, coming up short in the same way life and so many of its elements end prematurely. In the throes of such emptiness where speech fails to compensate for abandonment, and "there is this void, a space filled with mourning/ in silence," Grennan persists with courage and eloquence to contemplate the "'Soul,' [as] something like... a space/ that has shaped itself to the shape of what's gone/ and not returning."

Eamon Grennan�fs �gStill Life With Waterfall�h is a gallery of lush musics. Themes of grief, wounding & healing, and multiedged memory haunt many works, but many more are chiefly concerned with astonishment in the lights and lives of the world. And we are viscerally in the world on every page, never heaving confusedly through the endless tarpit of language. Rural and wild scenes tend to dominate Grennan�fs landscape, but these descriptively masterful poems never lapse into the merely painterly, are instead animate with an emotive intensity formed of equal parts sensing, thinking and feeling. He is a consistently formal poet, but the crackle of thought and image in his work leads one through fluidly, so that the formal properties only grow obvious after something electric has been transmitted.

Some poems aim at a verbal rendition of experience, the words themselves, as sonic bodies, more prominent than image, metaphor, or philosophy (�gCold Morning�h, �gGift�h, �gIn the Dunes�h): �gNothing to be seen or heard, the sea / not making the slightest ripple, vacant acres of glass / paving a way to islands that are light blue chimera / adrift on rafts of white mist. . . .�h Others employ Grennan�fs superbly tuned ear to find a way into and through the no-man�fs-land of grief (�gWhy?�h, �gMan Making the Bed�h, �gAsh�h): �gLying alone. . .he will dream / a wilderness of tents in moonlight: asleep, / they will be shivering a little, as if they felt the stars / press their chill rivets in, or the future / with red eyes whispering to rouse them.�h

Particularly interesting are Grennan�fs thirteen-line poems, some of the most effective and powerful in the book, by dint of the linguistic compression that is one of his strongest gifts, and of a sustained examination of one or two resonant images (�gPulse�h, �gWindowgrave�h, �gEnough�h): �ghaving seen his real presence / ignite like that�\the beautiful slow burn of it / as he steps from my sight into his own tangle of shadows�\ / and not having to content myself with the marks only / of his absence: the smell of him, his neat prints filling with sand.�h There is a wonderful movement from the intensity of description in the first poem (�gAt Work�h) to the consciousness of larger relations in the last (�gDetails�h), as though Grennan were teaching us, through attention, how to let the least event in the outer world foster inner meaning.

The description of sighting a fox in �gEnough�h describes well the overall project of the book: to fill with sensual connections the absences and nothings that come to pervade a life. Violence and death are always inherent to this process, but never unbeautiful: �gsilk-spurt of blood�h, �gThe sheep skeleton in the stream / resembles the inside of a small harpsichord.�h To paint over yin with the brightness of yang is to set foot on sentimentality�fs slippery, and psychically terminal, slope. There are times when Grennan approaches this precipice, but in the end insists that he means to sing it all, for �gThereness / is all: that burn of chance, quickened breath of appetite / adding up to all that this world offers�\ / glitter and shadow, pang of absence, the way / this day keeps coming on: we meet; we disappear.�h

Eamon Grennan is one of those academicians (he is currently a Professor of English at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie and the winner of the 2002 Heimbold Professor of Irish Studies at Villanova University) who is particularly gifted with an ability to spin and weave a poetry that is at once elegant, romantic, original, and linguistically subtle -- a memorable kind of literary music. Still Life With Waterfall is a welcome and recommended compendium of Grennan's unique and adroitly written verse. Windowgrave: The dead bee lies on the window-ledge, a relic,/its amber-yellow body barred in black and it head//tucked in, dust gathering on every follicle/and on the geodesic dome of the head--all rucked in//and tucked away, so near is death. And the many/flies too, all sizes, lying on their sides as if//asleep, just a quick nap and they'll be up and off/about their business. Souls, we used to say://bees, butterflies, moths, wasps, all sorts of flies,/the air crowded and loud with left over angels--/but not the spider in its complex web, fallen/from grace but walking on air, vigilant in ways//that harden the heart, getting its appetite back.