Reviewed: The Quick of It, poems by
Eamon Grennan. Publisher: Graywolf Press, 3/05. Paperback $14, 72pp.

Home // August.5.2016 // Onna Solomon

The World for What It Is

Sometimes poetry readings depress me-the coffee shops, the bookstores, the libraries, the conference rooms; the rows of cheap chairs set up for the decorous middle-aged crowd; the few younger audience members who sit on the floor; the effusive introductions that seem to reinforce this feeling that we are hovering over some dying fire, smoldering enough to keep the few of us still gathered around warm until someone forgets to blow on the meager embers and the whole thing ends with a sad thin wisp of smoke. With this in mind, I recently went to see Eamon Grennan read at the Cambridge Public Library Extension. I got there early. The chairs were all lined up, the room was dim and ugly. There was a flagpole topped with a one-winged metal eagle leaned against a wall with huge windows that looked onto the shabby houses on Pearl Street. The crowd came in, filling up half the seats. An older woman gave an introduction, praising Grennan for his Orphean powers and then the poet went to the podium.

Eamon Grennan is around sixty years old, a thin man with glasses and a wild white and grey beard. He got up there and I could tell just how much fun he was having-it was in his extravagant hand gestures, in his lovely lilting voice, in his stories and the way he bobbled his head deciding which poems to skip over, which ones to read. And his delight in the process was infectious. Despite my misgivings, he created a moment that was vital and alive.

In his new book of poems, too, there is no sense of weariness. The Quick of It is made up of sixty-five untitled, ten-line lyrics, each of which seem to be enjoying themselves despite their grappling with the perennial themes of nature, death and human longing. In 20th Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry, Robert Hass emphasizes the necessity of form in free verse, explaining that "the nature of the music of poetry has become an open question and music, the rhythm of poetry, is crucial to its form." Grennan has found a flexible framework that gives unity and structure to these free-flowing musical poems, many of which are one rambling sentence long.

Although there is no narrative or overt thematic thread throughout the book, these contemporary pastorals build tension through their intense syntax and dichotomous images of human perception and unthinking nature:

Back they sputter like the fires of love, the bees to their broken home
Which they're putting together again for dear life, knowing nothing
Of the heart beating under their floorboards, besieged there, seeking
A life of its own. All day their brisk shadows zigzag and flicker . . .

The sound and meaning in this passage are beautifully intertwined. The "sputter" of bees "putting together" a hive affects the "besieged," "beating" heart of the speaker. I imagine him groaning with the "o" sounds of "love," "knowing nothing," and "floorboards" in opposition to the "brisk" bees' "zigzag and flicker." This movement of vivid imagery and sound is sustained throughout the volume.

Grennan's keen observations are filled with an aching admiration for the world that comes from a felt mortality. He continuously returns to a division between sky and earth, with the human observer/speaker as the interpreter of nature's every-day existence. You get a sense that the poet sits at his window all day and writes what he sees. In fact, the window is used as a literal visual frame in quite a few poems and also as a metaphor for human perception. Birds are often his subject of observation. In one poem the speaker watches out the kitchen window as swallows fly "in daily negotiation with the great, unnamable force that lives in things." We hear envy in the speaker's description of the birds who are "beyond complaint, too busy living to be bogged or beaten down for long// . . . having only this instant/ Quick knowledge the moment gives them: and how to go on, making the most of it." Because of his own self-awareness, the speaker recognizes, unlike the birds that are "beyond even contentment," how dazzling the world can be. It is one of many examples in this book of the poet as the maker of meaning, imposing a human frame on nature. In another poem the speaker keeps trying to defog the windows so he can "see the world for what it is," and then realizes that it is his own breath that causes his obscured vision, his own existence getting in the way of the moment's essence.

There are few human connections in these poems, usually just a lone observer, who manifests mostly in the first person but is sometimes he or you. And though there is often a feeling of being alone, rarely does it feel lonely. In fact, the poems about people show that it is our interactions with each other that often make us feel singular and possibly lonely. A couple of poems about his daughter address the difficulties of letting her become her own person: "the distance// she's starting to be now, learning to be her own language . . ." Interesting that language is the metaphors he turns to here-the things he continuously glories in (i.e. language and nature) are the things that represent his loss. Take for example his autumn ruminations on the students returning to campus: "their ripe bodies shining//from every corner . . . their youth a raw burn against the season I feel in my depths."

The Quick of It is a Wordsworthian effort, a mature man's love poem to the living world, a romantic outpouring of appreciation. The poems express this through their visceral language-when you read them out loud, you can feel your mouth working around the words. In the weaker moments, Grennan's images verge on cliché or his language sounds like a heavy-handed tongue twister, but these moments are few. Phrases such as "the rainbow in the belly of the storm" or "swirl-whirling rock-dirvish" are far outnumbered by such fresh images as "the beetle's teeth// Ravening to bring all flesh to grass." Another small complaint is this strange hyphenation tic of his: "eureka-brisk surprise," "jangle-life," "deep-drowning in the air," "being-in-leaf"; there are many more than these to be found throughout the volume. These pairings seem too easy and rather unnecessary in most places.

But these are small gripes. Grennan has written an exquisite book of poems about our human need to shape and document the world we did not create, a reverent look at "the in-lit contingent presence things hold// in the moment to moment passage of their happening." It is an inexhaustible, exhausted story that he beats beautifully to death and then resurrects, and with which he reminds us that the fire is always dying and always being relit.

This review was original written in 2006, and published at the time on the reviewer's personal blog. It appears here with her permission. Banner graphic source: "Indian Summer" (cropped), a painting by William Trost Richards, 1875. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (25.110.6). In the public domain.