There Now: Poems

by Eamon Grennan

Overview

"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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781555977542
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	10/04/2016
Pages:	88
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.70(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Eamon Grennan is the author of numerous books, including Out of Sight: New & Selected Poems and Still Life with Waterfall, winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. He lives in Poughkeepsie, New York, and the west of Ireland.

Editorial Reviews

09/19/2016
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.” (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

Eamon Grennan’s poems sparkle in There Now.”—Vanity Fair

“[Eamon Grennan] brings poetry to every part of life: bird, leaf, tree, lake. . . . It’s verbal photography on every page, with the lilt of language creating a gold standard in the description of living things.”—Washington Independent Review of Books

“[There Now] bursts with a fullness of life as [Grennan] delights in observing landscapes, art, and all things ornithological.”—Publishers Weekly

“The poems’ probing observation and striving toward timelessness invoke the shimmering stillness of a painting. . . . There is always so much there in these poems, namely, the ongoing richness of a world full of significance if hardly of transparency, a richness that, as the title implies, both comforts and exhilarates.”—Booklist

“Grennan’s densely textured poetry of detail sharpens our perceptions as he teaches us to behold the world with the tender eyes of those who worship life’s beauty. . . . A brilliant celebration of the details of the natural world. . . . These are poems that both educate and delight.”—Sonja James, The Journal

“Grennan’s style [in There Now] is so distinctively textured, one perception following another, that readers will feel as if they are at his shoulder. . . . [There is] the clear sense that the process itself, the act of writing, opens the world in intimate, surprising, and revealing ways.”—The Irish Times

“Few poets are as generous as Eamon Grennan in the sheer volume of delight his poems convey.”—Billy Collins

From the Publisher

10/01/2016
Poet Billy Collins has praised "the sheer volume of delight" in poems by Grennan (e.g., Still Life with Waterfall), and readers approaching his newest collection with Collins's praise in mind will not be disappointed. Each of these single-sentence poems conveys a deep appreciation of both the natural world and the kind of hyperhyphenated compound phrasings that best capture the mysterious multiplicity of that world. Even the speaker's dreams maintain a connection to reality because he can't help but keep one eye trained on "the first felt breeze" of each day—"between Bring on more life!/ and that remorseless hunger that would end it." One could coin these poems "deep observation," a kind of offspring of poets Robert Bly, Robert Hass, and James Wright, known for "Deep Image" poetry. Not surprising, then, are nods to Li Po but also Celan, Cézanne, and Szymborska—all intense lookers. VERDICT Grennan here achieves what he set out to achieve: a purpose found in the poem titles (e.g., "things in the vicinity" and "with rainbow and two ravens"). Bring on more life! An accessible selection for general readers.—Stephen Morrow, Hilliard, OH

Library Journal