There Now: Poems

"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.

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.

Review :
"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