Relations: New and Selected Poems - Softcover

For example, in "Compass Reading" a cat killing a bird leads to a contemplation of death's inevitability: "I imagine / its first arrested screech, the cat / tasting a salt smear of blood / across tongue and teeth: she knows / the ripe smell of death ... wherever my ears go, they hear / nothing but clocks ticking, each tick / a distinct penetration of air, a pulsebeat / greeting its own goodbye." In "Oasis," a pool of water provides both joy and reflection. The poem is cast in short lines that each holds an image of water's pleasures, such as "you keep saying / its wedded syllables / as if they were enough" and "it fills, overspills / the heart in your mouth / like another life."

Grennan's exquisite poems give this bustling world of ours the luxury of pause, like sitting on a rooftop on a warm, starry night. You know that you may have been here before, but you've never seen stars quite like this.

"Few poets are as generous as Eamon Grennan in the sheer volume of delight his poems convey, and fewer still are as attentive to the available marvels of the earth. To read him is to be led on a walk through the natural world of clover and cricket and, most of all, light, and to face with an open heart the complexity of being human."--Billy Collins

"Eamon Grennan is a kind of Celtic amphibian, at home both in Ireland and America. He has the eye of a painter, the quiet ferocity of a Bonnard or Vermeer, intent on transfixing the moment. He has developed a long crackling line, with sentences like whiplashes, making poems that seem at once both mobile and at rest."--John Montague

This first major collection of Eamon Grennan's work ranges from delicate early lyrics to poems that explore in larger meditations the complex realms of family, the natural world, and love. Throughout, the poetry is marked by what Grennan refers to in one poem as "a fathoming/depth of attention anchored in the heart." Edward Hirsch has said that "as a poem of dailiness, Grennan tries to fix and nail things down even as the world melts before him." It is this sharp and profound double awareness of the solidity and fluency of things that is Grennan's most recognizable signature. These are poems that in the minute fidelity of their images and the refined mastery of their language prompt us to experience at a higher frequency the world we mostly take for granted.

Eamon Grennan is an Irish citizen who has lived in the United States for over thirty years. He teaches English at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. His books include So It Goes (finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize), What Light There Is and Other Poems (finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize), As If It Matters, and Leopardi: Selected Poems, which received the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.