Two Poems:
from Eamon Grennan's
The Quick of It

Eamon Grennan:

Eamon Grennan is from Dublin, Ireland, and has lived in the United States for many years. He is the author of six previous volumes of poetry, including Relations: New & Selected Poems and Still Life with Waterfall which was awarded the 2003 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. His collection of translations, Leopardi: Selected Poems, won the 1997 PEN Translation Award for Poetry. A collection of his critical essays, Facing the Music: Irish Poetry in the Twentieth Century, was published in 1999. Grennan has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, and he has taught at numerous universities, including New York University, Columbia University, and Villanova University. He lives in Poughkeepsie, New York, where he has been a longtime member of the English Department at Vassar College, and divides his time between there and the west of Ireland. (Photo by Neal Greig)

About The Quick of It:

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.

"Eamon Grennan's writing brings us over and over again to the discovery of what is naturally so and had passed unrecognized."
— W. S. Merwin

"Grennan is in love with language the way a poet should be. I read him with care — and admiration."
— Gerald Stern

"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

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