So It Goes: Poems

by Eamon Grennan

Eamon Grennan is a writer who is able to find sensuality in the small gestures of the world--in the look of a firefly, the sound of a step, the tastes of a meal, the rhythm in things. A poet of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1555972322
• ISBN13: 9781555972325
• Release Date: November 1995
• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• Length: 90 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Grennan's poetic concerns are well displayed here.

Having read strong work by Grennan in The New Yorker magazine in recent years, I decided to try him at book length. This handsomely printed trade paperback offers a large selection of poems, most of them published in the most distinguished poetry magazines in America (one is also from Irish Times). There is no questioning Grennan's skill as a wordsmith; his turns of phrase evoke scenes with a hallucinatory accuracy. The book as a whole is rather heavy, though, because the majority of it recounts the writer's sad struggle with his mother's slow death. A Wordsworthian at heart, Grennan recollects in tranquillity the incidents that most struck his senses. For my money (the book costs $14.00), the best material here are his poems on animals ("Towards Dusk the Porcupine," "Bat," and "Horses," the last of which is the best in the book) and "Angel Looking Away," an extraordinary blending of a Florentine Renaissance bas-relief with a 20th century scene of political torture. That is Grennan doing what other poets can or do not.