A poem from Eamon Grennan's 1995 collection, So It Goes, describes a bat which flew into his room and circled several times before it finally found a way out through a window he had opened. The poem draws a moral from this, "how to behave/in a tight corner":
Keep quiet
keep moving
try everything
more than once . . .
till you find
in your way
with no warning
the window
open.
This is a telling thumbnail sketch of the process in many of Grennan's poems and suggests a writer working under duress, despite the stoicism of his temper. The voice is quiet, in that it does not rage, or scold, or express indignation. With its strong American conditioning (Grennan has taught in the US for many years), there is a detachment from history, place and community, those factors that delimit many talents on this side of the Atlantic. Values that we associate with these, such as loyalty, love, and reverence, are to be found here applied to the natural world instead.
At the end of the poem, the bat gets out. Similarly, in the final line of several poems, the meaning manages to get out, having kept moving, like the bat. Again and again, there's a closing inflection which signals away from the poem's fabric towards a further insight. Grennan typically reaches for a final flourish with phrases such as: "growing strange", "we turn to go", "about to happen", "and still running", "The house quickens".
It is only in the poems unfolding out of distress, where he confronts family life, that we feel the poet making a more robust engagement. The break-up of a marriage operates as a caesura about half-way through this collection, with language finally riding on the urgency of real feeling in "Breaking Points". The best poems in the book follow on from this, including a painful look at his own early family life in "Night Figure", and a superb love-poem to his daughter, "Two Gathering", patterned in the description of an evening gathering mussels with her in Connemara, where he rejoices "at the breathless plenitude of the world".
When a poet eschews rhyme, as Eamon Grennan almost always does, he invests in the raw kinetic energy of the unaided voice to carry the effect. When the individual is under the pressure of an unusual insight, this approach can work, albeit at a personal cost. Given the atmosphere of unmediated privacy which predominates here, it is the poems dealing with personal vulnerability that ring truest.
Sean Lysaght is a poet and critic