The Quick of It: Poems

by Eamon Grennan

Overview

The latest collection by Irish poet Eamon Grennan, winner of the 2003 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize

we have to be at home here no matter what no matter what the shivering belly says or the dry-salted larynx no matter the frantic pulse no matter what happens

—from "[because the body stops here . . . ]"

The poems in Eamon Grennan's The Quick of It—each one without title and compacted into ten taut lines—are rendered with exquisite detail and reverence for the everyday elements of weather, landscape, family, art, questions. Grennan's poems are persistent amplified acts of attention, proving with every detail—light glancing off stone, an orange stem framing a Chardin still life, the contours of the body trapping the mind—that we are our best selves when we are most alert.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781555974183
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	04/01/2005
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	72
Product dimensions:	6.92(w) x 8.02(h) x 0.22(d)

About the Author

Eamon Grennan is a poet, translator, and essayist. He is the author of Relations: New & Selected Poems and Still Life with Waterfall. He splits his time between Poughkeepsie, New York, and Ireland.

Editorial Reviews

Grennan would have us know—no, would have us see, feel, hear, taste, and smell—that the world, moment by ordinary or agonizing moment, lies chock-full with its own clarifications and rewards. That such rewards most often go unnoticed keeps the artists in business, so to speak, and if there is anything more likely to open us to the savor of life than poems like Grennan's, I can't imagine what it might be.” —Robert Wrigley, citation for the 2003 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for Still Life with Waterfall

From the Publisher