Items related to Still life with waterfall (Gallery books)
Still Life with Waterfall
Whether attending to a painting, a moment of love, or a hawk hunting over marshland, Eamon Grennan, in the words of the poet and critic Cal Bedient, "presents the commonplace in so luminous a spirit that it spreads meaning, by analogy, into our own lives." In this bold collection, Grennan widens his poetic gaze on the natural world and brings sharp focus to moments of intimacy, capturing in fresh verse the age-old connections between lovers.
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About the Author:
From Publishers Weekly:
Eamon Grennan is an Irish citizen who has lived in the US for over thirty years. He teaches English at Vassar College and Irish Studies at Villanova University. He has published several books of poems, essays, and translations.
"Uncertainly there, but there,/ smell of lindens after rain,/ then nothing/ but heaped earth, fallen branches,/ the animal/ scrabbling to survive." Grennan's new poems take up the regular small catastrophes of the natural world frost, fire or predators with their small, doomed prey, like the sparrowhawk that "simply plucks/ like a ripe fruit the stopped robin, whose two or three/ cheeps of terminal surprise twinkle in the silence/ closing over the empty street...." These are sometimes metaphors for human relationships, but more often reminders of human mortality and vulnerability. Indeed, there's a strong sense of foreboding in these pieces, as well as a search for a larger continuity beyond the routine natural calamities. "I keep my eyes shut fast... and hear nothing at first, nothing, and then as if out of the egg of silence small sounds hatching:/ thin fluting of a goldfinch; song sparrow's single note/ of warning; in the distance a hawk's cry broken off;/ crackle of one twig slipping free of another; the tide's/ perpetual faint susurrus, no end to its run-on sentence,/ and that dry whisper as the sand in sleep keeps shifting." The relationship of Grennan's speaker to this natural world is ambivalent occasionally an agent of destruction, but usually an observer, watching "through an accidental crack in the curtain" a world that seems indifferent to observation or consciousness. Readers will find few surprises within it, but Grennan's "unwavering concentration" (as one poem puts it) is convincing.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherGallery Press
- Publication date2001
- ISBN 10 1852352949
- ISBN 13 9781852352943
- BindingHardcover
- Edition number1
- Number of pages79
- Rating
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