Keynote
“Few poets are as generous as Eamon Grennan in the sheer volume of delight his poems convey.”—Billy Collins
Book Title
There Now
Subtitle
Poems
Cover Image
- “Eamon Grennan’s poems sparkle in There Now.”—Vanity Fair
Poem Excerpt
. . . 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”
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”
Body
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.
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About the Author
Credit: Don J. Usner
Praise
- “A brilliant celebration of the details of the natural world. . . . These are poems that both educate and delight.”—Sonja James, The Journal
- “[There Now is] 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
- “Poet Billy Collins has praised ‘the sheer volume of delight’ in poems by Grennan, 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.”—Library Journal
