The Quick of It contains short, intense poems encompassing Eamon Grennan’s signature virtues of close attention to the natural world, his meticulous notations of landscape, animals, and weather — all given lyrical authority by his gift for muscular syntax and musical language — are augmented by vigorous responses to edgy emotional states, by a sharpened alertness to conditions of human solitude and human relationship.
The resulting work — without titles and intending no narrative plan or sequence — offers a refracted portrait of a consciousness responding to some of the transient ordinary features of the daily life it leads and is led by. In unusually long lines, braced by their steady cadences, each poem offers a palpable sense of the local moment and its fleeting but deeply textured, potentially universal nature.
‘Fully attuned to the natural world, Grennan at times even reflects a Hopkinsesque spiritual aspect. Glimpsing a robin on the wing, for example, “its burnt-orange / Breast, an emblem blown to brightness by the cloudy morning,” he responds: “I almost // Feel it as the quick blink of God’s one eye, the eureka-brisk surprise given / And taken, the echt unmanageable absolute of it in the moment passing. Dividing his year between Poughkeepsie, New York and Connemara in the western part of his native Ireland, Eamon Grennan is an altogether cosmopolitan poet. While some of his poems have recognizable Irish settings, the volume as a whole resonates with a capaciousness that transcends place specificity. The Quick of It is an altogether engaging and enriching book of lyric poetry.’ — Harvard Review
