The Quick of It: Poems

When I first heard Eamon Grennan read his poetry and speak on Lannan Literary videos, I was stunned by his intensity and brilliance. I longed to see the poems on the page, and am not disappointed to see his workings of the 10-line, no-title form he's created. Nature and humanity are interdependent in Grennan's poetry. Nature illuminates, soothes, counsels, and guides the way. Opening "The Quick of It" at random, I find a favorite: "Not the fierce fragility/Birds are: robins, waxwings, starlins that cluster along eaves or swirl about/The slate and copper rooftops, or gather in bare beech and sycamore branches/Whose last leaves drift in the no-wind and land so soft on water they cause no/Circles, are tiny boats fraught with light: not solid things but, like your breath,/Desperately there--warm,no words in it, nothing to build on or be sheltered by." (p. 35) Reading Grennan's work is akin to decoding Buddhist scripture. It's all here. Grennan presents us with illustrated images of impermanence--that the world is not the solid one we think it is; that it is futile to grasp on to what is essentially ungraspable. But, not unknowable, if we grant this essentialized knowing first. --Janet Grace Riehl, author Sightlines: A Poet's Diary

The Quick of It is an absolutely beautiful book. Eamon Grennan has found a striking balance between sonics, imagery and narrative. So that his poems "take us there," and in our reading of his work we forget ourselves. It's a struggle to type an excerpt considering how well the poems work in their wholeness. Readers finds themselves reacting not to a single line or phrase but to the poems in their entirety -- I can't think of a much rarer occurrence in poetry. The poems are like miniature paintings, and yet we are taken in by just how full and lush they are. In The Quick of It the physical world not only comes alive, it smiles back, full and fantastic and frightful. I have not read a book of poetry this good in many months.

The Quick Of It is an anthology of poems by poet, essayist, translator, and Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize winner Eamon Grennan. Each poem is without a title and stretches precisely ten lines; explores its subject with acute, alert attention to detail. Creatures of nature are a recurring theme in this reflective, sometimes dark, sometimes wistful, always moving verse. So I keep saving the bees taken unawares by glass, / Shrouding their music in a bundled dishclothtill I shake / It outside and they float off over the fuchsia hedge. // So the moths that flutter up from curtain folds and out / Of the sleeves of old sweaters are fingersnapped at / To become Ash Wednesday stains on my handskin. // So the snail is lifted from the sand, laid on wet grass, / And so the yellow car in my dream is stalked till it turns / To a lean woman in suede leaning in to me. So who / Handles all this? Lays all of it out? Keeps the reckoning?