The still life and waterfall in the title of Eamon Grennan’s fifth collection, Still Life with Waterfall, indicate a meditative stance before his subjects and a participation in their kinetic turbulence.
These poems attend to recurrent agitations — loss, memory and desire — within a consciousness on edge. Marking a swerve from the more relaxed moods and manners of earlier work, these poems frame the tensions of emotional stress while, in their ‘agnostic praise’, they continue to bring a characteristic shine to whatever the poet’s gaze falls on. Alert as ever to what’s happening in the natural world — its landscape, weather and living inhabitants — they illuminate also the even more complex world of human relationships.
‘Temperate in tone but charged with verbal energy, the poems of Eamon Grennan cast a contemplative eye on the present moment. Reminiscent, by turns, of Bishop, Hopkins, and Traherne, they reflect a meditative mind attuned to the flux of immediate experience. “Thereness / is all,” Grennan declares in “Aubade,” a recent poem, as he observes “the way // this day keeps coming on.” And in their stately but kinetic sentences, their contained but insurgent lines, his poems strike a felicitous balance between solidity and fluidity, presence and disappearance, stability, and change.’ — New Hibernia Review
