There Now

. . . there goes the sudden shriek
of the blackbird . . . all alive inside the inhuman
breath-pattern of the wind trawling every last leaf
and blade of grass and flinging rain like velvet pebbles
onto the skylight: nothing but parables in every bristling inch
of the out-of-sight unspoken never-to-be-known pure
sense-startling untranslatable there of the world as we find it.

—from "World Word"

In these short poems full of patient listening, looking, and responding, Eamon Grennan presents a world of brilliantly excavated moments: watching a flight of oystercatchers off a Connemara strand or the laden stall of a fish market in Manhattan; listening to the silence in an empty room or the beat of his partner's heart; pondering violence in the Middle East or the tenuous, endangered nature of even "the fairest / order in the world." Grennan's philosophic gaze manages to allow the ordinary facts of life to take on their own luminous glow. It is the sort of light he finds in some of his favorite painters—Cézanne, Bonnard, Renoir, the Dutch masters—light that is inside things and drawn out to our attention. There Now is a celebration of the momentary recognition of transcendence, all the more precious for being momentary.