Who is Eamon Grennan

Eamon Grennan (born 1941) is an Irish poet born in Dublin. He has lived in the United States, except for brief periods, since 1964. He was the Dexter M. Ferry Jr. Professor of English at Vassar College until his retirement in 2004.

Biography

Though his Irish roots are clear in his poetry, Grennan has an international sense of literary tradition. He has cited as influences American poets including Robert Frost and Elizabeth Bishop (herself an international poet with ties to the U.S., Canada, and Brazil). In addition to writing poetry, he has translated Giacomo Leopardi and—with his wife, Vassar classicist Rachel Kitzinger—Sophocles's Oedipus at Colonus.

Grennan studied at University College, Dublin, where he met poets Derek Mahon and Eavan Boland, and a...
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Eamon Grennan Poems

• One Morning
  Looking for distinctive stones, I found the dead otter
  rotting by the tideline, and carried all day the scent of this savage
  valediction. That headlong high sound the oystercatcher makes
  came echoing through the rocky cove ...
• The Cave Painters
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• Untitled: Back They Sputter
  Back they sputter like the fires of love, the bees to their broken home
  Which they're putting together again for dear life, knowing nothing
  Of the heart beating under their floorboards, besieged here, seeking
  A life of its own. All day their brisk shadows zigzag and flicker...
• Art
  The whole chorus saying only one thing: look
  at what goes, where we stand in the midst of it:
  Golden eyes of the beginning, deep patience
  of the end. Stone-deaf, the rocks in silence...
• On A Cape May Warbler Who Flew Against My Window
  She's stopped in her southern tracks
  Brought haply to this hard knock
  When she shoots from the tall spruce
  And snaps her neck on the glass....

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Eamon Grennan Quotes

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Comments about Eamon Grennan

• Adriennecrezo: eamon grennan's discussion of otherness and the "camoflage of invisibility" is very interesting!
• Jsrichman: eamon grennan on the irish coast to wake you up. (just a bit)
• Gbclarkson: houseplants in winter their survival seems an open question: i make a mess of watering, prune without discretion, grieve over the leaf whose borders burn and curl. their fresh petals a perpetual surprise-- minute coral hearts, magnesium stars... eamon grennan
• Poemakontsa: to the moon giacomo leopardi on the moon and remembrance of things past. to the heartbroken (tr. eamon grennan) now that the year has come full circle, i remember climbing this hill, heartbroken, to gaze up at the graceful sight of you, and how you hung then above those woods
• Danmulhall: i want his delicate balance, his sturdy, sane, domesticated grace. … equilibrist of spirit, solid nerve. crowblack and solemn, he holds himself together, between limegreen ice & coral air. beyond his ken, out of the picture, the fixed stars hold him fast. eamon grennan

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