There Now
Poems
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
"Few poets are as generous as Eamon Grennan in the sheer volume of delight his poems convey." --Billy Collins
. . . there goes the sudden shriek
of the blackbird . . . all alive inside the inhuman
breath-pattern of the wind trawling every last leaf
and blade of grass and flinging rain like velvet pebbles
onto the skylight: nothing but parables in every bristling inch
of the out-of-sight unspoken never-to-be-known pure
sense-startling untranslatable there of the world as we find it.
--from "World Word"
In these short poems full of patient listening, looking, and responding, Eamon Grennan presents a world of brilliantly excavated moments: watching a flight of oystercatchers off a Connemara strand or the laden stall of a fish market in Manhattan; listening to the silence in an empty room or the beat of his partner's heart; pondering violence in the Middle East or the tenuous, endangered nature of even "the fairest / order in the world." Grennan's philosophic gaze manages to allow the ordinary facts of life to take on their own luminous glow. It is the sort of light he finds in some of his favorite painters--Cézanne, Bonnard, Renoir, the Dutch masters--light that is inside things and drawn out to our attention. There Now is a celebration of the momentary recognition of transcendence, all the more precious for being momentary.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The latest collection from poet and translator Grennan (Matter of Fact) bursts with a fullness of life as he delights in observing landscapes, art, and all things ornithological. It's a birdlike awareness, he notes, "that keeps you keeping a peeled eye on them/ in their infinitely minute changes of colour/ as each speedy heartbeat hammers its own brisk/ rivet of breath into the air you're staring through/ at them." Grennan, who splits his time between the Hudson Valley and the west of Ireland, uses language to texture the natural world's array of colors, changes of season, and myriad sounds. He conveys the fleeting scenes he witnesses through poems of subtle rhyme and adept alliteration: "grass glows a shade of grey/ recalling what daylight does to operatic cloudbanks/ while across open fields brimming with silver-smitten/ shapes of thornbushes and sycamore leaves and spiny/ stilled rushes a single swan-white cottage glows." Elsewhere, he watches a pregnant cow, with the fetus "soft-pulsing in tune and time to its mother's entranced/ and steadily ruminative chewing." Whether he's savoring the word truffle, recording the sensations of standing inside a Richard Serra sculpture, or listening to rats in his attic, Grennan finds that "all is language settling and unsettling the world."
