Whether his subject lies in the natural world or in the world of human relations, Eamon Grennan’s Selected and New Poems engage at a level of probing intimacy. In richly wrought verbal webs of description and recognition, through combinations of hard facts and revelations, they attach us, by the quality of their attention, always more closely to the daily world.
By belonging and not belonging — to Ireland, and to America (where he has lived for more than thirty years) — Grennan’s poems also embody a many-facetted and doubly accented contemplation of the meanings of ‘home’. The New Yorker has described him as ‘a poet of plain-spoken reverence’, the effect of whose poetry ‘is like afternoon light hitting ordinary objects: it illuminates, clarifies, and directs our gaze towards what it is we love but often overlook’.
