Out of Sight: New & Selected Poems (review)

No Irish poet has more faithfully adhered to Stephen Dedalus's injunction to open oneself to the "ineluctable modality of the visible" and to read there the "signatures of all things" than Eamon Grennan. Throughout a career that now spans four decades, and which is fully reprised in this most recent volume of new and selected poems, Grennan has traced the configurations of whatever shards of the visible pass before him, illuminating, as he wrote in The Quick of It, "the in-lit contingent presence things hold / / In the moment to moment passage of their happening." His eye remains focused on the proximate world that he inhabits, whether it is the wooded domain of New York or the stark coast of Connemara, the sites of his residences—but it ranges widely within these familiar horizons, moving easily between the immensities of sky, mountain, and sea and the minutiae of a ladybug's markings or a sycamore leaf 's detritus.

Grennan registers this ocular orientation of his verse in a frequent evocation of painting, especially the work of Vermeer and Bonnard, in his precise attention to color, and by his fascination with the ever-changing aura of light. But it is Grennan's deft coordination of the movements of eye and ear that constitutes the particular grace of his artistry. Consider, for example, these lines from an early poem in which the visual intricacy of the illuminated manuscripts produced by Irish monks is replicated in a twisted skein of assonance, alliteration, and oblique rhyme: ". . . a binding / labyrinth of lit affinities / to spell out in nature's lace and fable/ their mindful, blinding sixth sense/ of a god of shadows." Virtually every page in this volume offers a similar opportunity to indulge in what Geoffrey Hartman refers to as "lust of the ears." Grennan's verse exhibits a musical refulgence that recalls Hopkins, one of his primary influences, but that is free from the idiosyncrasy and ostentatious display that were by-products of the Jesuit poet's isolation. The result is a benchmark in the longstanding project of free-verse poetry to interfuse ordinary language with the heightened musicality of the traditional lyric.

One of the benefits of a collection such as this—which incorporates the earlier poetry gathered in Relations: New and Selected Poems (1998) as well as a selection from the three volumes published since then, and uncollected new poems—is that it elucidates the continuity of Grennan's poetic career. Certainly, in the more recent poetry one can find ample evidence of Grennan's willingness to innovate: the intermittent intrusion of a more fractured syntax in Still Life with Waterfall (2002), the long-lined decastich used throughout The Quick of It (2005), the occasional appearance of prose poems in Matter of Fact (2008), the Hopkins-like compounds that percolate throughout the last volumes. And there is a slight shift as well in the focus of the recent poetry written in the wake of 9/11 and the midst of the "war on terror," where bad news from "the big world" impinges more frequently upon the poet's usual meditative stance.

Yet, even a cursory survey of Out of Sight reveals its formal and thematic cohesion. To speak of a typical Grennan poem would insult the poet's imaginative dexterity; nonetheless, familiar patterns that this volume throws into relief. The gravitational center of the poems is often an observed scene culled from the natural world or, less frequently, the daily routine of domestic life. A line of cows moving in the mist, a heron hunting in the tidal shallows, a bee bumping repeatedly against a windowpane, a carved pumpkin slowly rotting on a fencepost, a child bursting through the front door, a lover gazing out a window—something catches the poet's eye and is itself captured, at least for the moment, in all its whorled singularity.

But nothing is fixed for long in these poems; everything flows. The syntax, unfurling rapidly and cascading over line breaks, evokes the...