Eamon Grennan’s fourth collection, So It Goes, takes its cue from a line by Rilke: ‘So we live here, forever taking leave.’
As in the author’s earlier books, these elegies and muted celebrations move easily between Irish and American landscapes — from a summer garden in Harold’s Cross to a snowy street in Poughkeepsie, from fields in County Monaghan to mountains in New Hampshire. Keeping their own fine balance between scepticism and affirmation, the poems manage to hold things in focus — for a moment — so we can ‘see more clearly in’.
So It Goes, ‘Grennan’s fourth book of poems — from elegies on his parents’ deaths to celebrations of the natural world — is an occasion to savour the restorative power of observation. His lyrics show how the details of our surroundings return with charged clarity after periods of grief, and his remarkably supple sentences embrace both ‘the silence of almost infinite possibility and the / explosion of things as they are.’ —The New Yorker
Grennan is courageous enough to trust the details, the triggers, to generate his haunting and beautiful poems. — Pat Boran, Irish Studies Review
“Eamon Grennan’s writing brings us over and over again to the discovery of what is naturally so and had passed unrecognised.” ―W.S. Merwin
