The Quick of It: Poems - Softcover

Grennan, Eamon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 155597418X ISBN 13: 9781555974183

Publisher: Graywolf Press, 2005

Synopsis

The latest collection by Irish poet Eamon Grennan, winner of the 2003 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize

we have to be at home here no matter what no matter what the shivering belly says or the dry-salted larynx no matter the frantic pulse no matter what happens
―from "[because the body stops here . . . ]"

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.

About this title

About the Author

Eamon Grennan is a poet, translator, and essayist. He is the author of Relations: New & Selected Poems and Still Life with Waterfall. He splits his time between Poughkeepsie, New York, and Ireland.

From Publishers Weekly

Composed of untitled 10-line poems, Grennan's sixth collection gets down less to brass tacks than to elementals: "So this is what it comes down to? Earth and sand/ Skimmed, trimmed, filletted from rocky bone... protestant/ To the pin of its terminal collar." Birds make regular appearances, not only as symbols of flight and freedom, but also of mortality: "Still I can smell / The dead—till darkwings open wide and rise, cutting things off." While Grennan indisputably writes a conventional lyric of man's insignificance in the face of nature, he is rescued from neoromanticism—and from the label of "nature poet"—by a kind of unswerving pessimism. The subjects of these tightly composed poems shift—art, domesticity, cows in a field, tulips, insomnia—but they convey the same message, over and over: the need to reconcile oneself to the fact that we are only visitors to this world: "Up to its belly in snow, the cat watches some bird or famished mouse/ Make its own cold life minutely happen." While its tones are lovely and clear, the book's compulsive restatement of mortality and acceptance sounds the same note over and over. Ask not for whom the bell tolls. (Apr.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 155597418X
• ISBN 13: 9781555974183
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 72