Illuminated Manuscripts: Eamon Grennan

by Nina Shengold and photographs by Jennifer May, January 28, 2011

It’s impossible to meet Eamon Grennan without knowing at once where he’s from. His musical lilt, wild thicket of eyebrow, and affable smile are every bit as Irish as his name. So it’s a bit startling to hear that the Dublin-born poet has identity issues.

The Vassar professor emeritus and author of Out of Sight: New and Selected Poems (Graywolf Press, 2010) has lived in the US since 1965, when he became a graduate student at Harvard, but has never sought citizenship. “I’m a resident alien—like every poet, I suppose,” he says with relish. Perceived as an Irishman in Poughkeepsie and an expatriate in Ireland, Grennan describes himself as “neither here nor there—or rather, here and there.
“One of the things I was working toward with Out of Sight was that doubleness as the dominant feature,” he attests. “I’m seen as an Irish poet who writes American poetry, or an American poet inflected with Irishness—as a poet of both places.”

Indeed. Grennan’s poetry flows like a body of water between native and adopted shores; it’s no accident that Out of Sight begins and ends at the liminal edge of the ocean, where shorebirds skitter and tides perform their daily cycles. The book’s first line is “I would like to let things be”; the last is “the jag-line leading from this to that, before you turn for home.” In between are two decades of work that amount to an autobiography of sight and reflection.

Plainspoken and richly evocative, Grennan’s poems are filled with birds, plants, and water, with windows and light—the natural world and the means by which we perceive it. “There are not a lot of people in my poems,” he remarks a bit ruefully, but there’s one who is present in every line: the poet himself, as a preternaturally sharp-eyed, full-hearted observer of life in its glorious, aching detail. Former US Poet Laureate Billy Collins has written, “Few poets are as generous as Eamon Grennan in the sheer volume of delight his poems convey, and fewer still are as attentive to the available marvels of the earth.”

The surface narrative of a Grennan poem is often an everyday moment—a bee becomes trapped behind window glass, a garbage collector upturns shining cans, a father watches his son embark on a train—that illuminates emotional truths lurking just out of sight. “I’m struck sharp as a heart pain/ by the way this minute brims/ with the whole story,” he writes in “Two Climbing.”