Out of Sight: New and Selected Poems

by Eamon Grennan

Overview

THE RETROSPECTIVE COLLECTION BY EAMON GRENNAN, WHOSE POETRY "ILLUMINATES, CLARIFIES, AND DIRECTS OUR GAZE TOWARD WHAT IT IS WE LOVE BUT OFTEN OVERLOOK" (THE NEW YORKER)

Out of Sight collects poetry from across Eamon Grennan's decorated career, with generous selections from his seven previous books and more than thirty new poems. This is the definitive book by one of contemporary poetry's most sensuous and shimmering voices.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781555975647
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	07/20/2010
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

EAMON GRENNAN is the author of seven poetry collections, including Matter of Fact and Still Life with Waterfall, which won the 2003 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. He lives in Poughkeepsie, New York, and the west of Ireland.

Read an Excerpt

Stumble on, so, to true wakefulness, all dreams dissipated, and stop silenced on a seal-smooth rock half-buried in sand, knowing nothing but the burden of what you’ve seen, pondering the simple specific gravity of it . . .
—from “From This to That”

Editorial Reviews

Grennan, whose last new & selected volume, Relations, appeared in 1998, has spent a career moving between Poughkeepsie, N.Y., where he teaches at Vassar College, and the west country of his native Ireland, facing the Atlantic. Both locales have afforded ample material for this career-summing volume, which begins with Troubles-infused work from the 1980s that brings war into the home: "Here/ is the light glinting on top-boots, on/ the barrel of an M16 that grins.... And here/ is a small room where robust winter sunlight/ rummages much of the day." Grennan finds people's unfoldings in accretive observations of the natural world, but he's usually closely rather than expansively meditative: his imagery--famously striking, often erotic, and sometimes crossing over into violence--makes his short poems read like "one stanchless wound of sound." A pervading restlessness makes this book a pleasure to pick up in fits and starts, particularly in the later erotic poems, finding here the "neat/ green and tea-brown trapezoids/ of grass and bog," there the "azzle-amber of the shirt you wore." One gets the sense of a writer who bridles at limitation yet is acutely aware of its inevitability, who wants to reveal "everything tucked in like a heart in its beating chest of bone/ so the whole body thrums with it." (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

Eamon Grennan's poems are like . . . verbal equivalents of seventeenth-century Dutch paintings. How luminously they capture the brimming fullness of daily life, how scrupulously they come to terms with the complex reality of the limited, given world, how radiantly they clarify ‘the daily / ineluctable clutter of our lives.' These poems shine and matter.” —EDWARD HIRSCH on Eamon Grennan

From the Publisher