Eamon GrennanRecensioni

A solid collection from Eamon Grennan, largely pastoral, more often in New York than Ireland, all untitled and not formal poems. The best had a tumbling raucous quality like stones in a river swollen with spring run-off.

This was a feast of apt words and compound nouns-adjectives-verbs derived mainly from rural imagery mixed between the US and the West of Ireland, but every once in a while Grennan selects, say, a jet or a laborer working at precarious height in an urban setting, and his eye is equally facile and his tongue as adept as with the more familiar bucolic settings. Grennan even attempts to capture some shades of 9-11 in here; they are devastated poems; one can almost see him know the project is doomed to failure before he writes, but he must write nonetheless. Still, he is at his best in careful observation, such as the poem in which he describes a heron with its "spindleshins" stuck deep in mud.

A magical collection that is somehow also workmanlike and at times seems like a conversation among Irish poets because of the shoutouts to numerous practitioners. The best poems are focused on figures, men mostly: there is one involving roofers in New York City that is at once proud, muscular, erotic, and full of bravado.