Eamon Grennan’s latest collection, Of Shards and Tatters operates largely in the realm of the Covid days, but tonally it’s a long way from any sense of put-upon penance. Instead, Grennan consistently looks on the bright side, and the poems here aim as much at an almanac of “hope/in this otherwise darkling time” as anything.
Grennan tends towards the long, clause-heavy, sentence, his poems spooling out a thought across several lines, almost whole poems at times, which can work as a means of taking his internal monologue for a walk but can also lead him into meandering. There’s an at-times forced cheeriness, a thread of “good enough … to be going on with” which becomes something of a refrain, a form of willed bonhomie which risks becoming cloying but manages to largely avoid it through Grennan’s enthusiasm and apparent guilelessness.
It’s somewhat bold to attempt to capture ordinary, domestic happiness as Grennan consistently tries to, writing of “the happy cold contented/lot of us” and gritting his teeth while making the best of it. This instinct receives its most difficult test in elegies for his brother, some of the best work here, especially On Mourning which allows us to tune our ear a little and see quite how much rapid pedalling is going on under the surface for Grennan to maintain his optimistic notes.
While Grennan’s eye is often tuned to flora and fauna, to nature’s motto of “More life! More life!” he looks to write poems that say yes to all of it, and set about celebrating “ordinary/wonders of the world”. Occasionally, as of the “plague-ridden time” he sets about memorialising, there’s a sense that one poem “bleeds into every other”, but as in several here on memory, and a kind of haunting via childhood, this can also lend time itself a certain degree of fluidity in this benevolent, mindful book.
— Declan Ryan, The Irish Times
