Poetic and critic Grennan provides a fine, comprehensive review of the modern Irish poetic tradition, using Yeats as a starting point and providing essays which consider the modern evolution of Irish poetry. An excellent survey of authors and titles evolves in an absorbing, intriguing discussion which will attract any with special interest in Irish poetry.

Eamon Grennan is one of those academicians (he is currently a Professor of English at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie and the winner of the 2002 Heimbold Professor of Irish Studies at Villanova University) who is particularly gifted with an ability to spin and weave a poetry that is at once elegant, romantic, original, and linguistically subtle -- a memorable kind of literary music. Still Life With Waterfall is a welcome and recommended compendium of Grennan's unique and adroitly written verse. Windowgrave: The dead bee lies on the window-ledge, a relic,/its amber-yellow body barred in black and it head//tucked in, dust gathering on every follicle/and on the geodesic dome of the head--all rucked in//and tucked away, so near is death. And the many/flies too, all sizes, lying on their sides as if//asleep, just a quick nap and they'll be up and off/about their business. Souls, we used to say://bees, butterflies, moths, wasps, all sorts of flies,/the air crowded and loud with left over angels--/but not the spider in its complex web, fallen/from grace but walking on air, vigilant in ways//that harden the heart, getting its appetite back.

Tour the innermost depths of your feelings about your child, spouse, and lover vis a vis Eamon Grennan's sensitive eye. No one sees the complexities of human relationships in quite the same way as this Irish poet and professor. His eye for detail is amazing and his heart is always willing. Some of these poems are brief moments in time, trying desparately to capture a certain feeling state in words that most of us are barely conscious of. Others are more drawn out and playful, as if the poet is experimenting with relationships, trying to bring us into his, knowing that we either will or will not relate. Grennan dares to explore such complex feeling states as the husband witnessing his wife breast feeding their infant, or the departure of an adolescent son. He hones in on the scene at hand with an uncanny look at the human interaction and the backdrop of weather, or highway lights on a dark night. Just as the poems get intense, Grennan comforts us with a ditty and we move on. I, for one, like the intensity of the epiphanistic style he is known for and could do without the lighter poems which he interjects, but, all in all, any English major or student of psychology will absolutely devour these sensational poems.

Eamon Grennan's comprehensive book of poetry, "Relations" is about all kinds of relationships: family relationships, all human relationships, subtle, superficial, deep, and every other kind of relationship in-between. It is also about how we relate to ourselves, nature, the earth, concepts of divinity, and ultimately it is about how we love, and fail to love.

My favorite poem in here is called "Streak of Light," about Grennan's own departing college-age son, literally streaking across grass in college with his mates. Grennan was inspired to write this poem when his son told him about this actual streaking incident. This is a poem of true love, and true letting go. Extremely powerful.

"Skunk" is another favorite poem of mine in this collection, and in fact, Grennan's poetry is full of animals, light, color, air, water, and motion. It is alive, vital, and vibrant in the deepest, most resonant sense.

"Sea-Dog" is a masterful poem about the trouble in Ireland (political and religious violence between neighbors). This is a rare exception for Grennan, who does not usually write about this subject, and it is a powerful meditation.

I believe Grennan may use language like a great painter uses water-colors, or oil to make art that transforms the reader, and the world itself, by changing how we, as readers, see the world.

This is a great book, and I recommend it to everybody.

Well, here it is. Eamon Grennan's life's work. These poems written over an approximately 20 year period form the basis of a genuine career in poetry. Taken together with his translation of Leopardi from Italian, and original essays, it appears to be an especially valuable and admirable one. I would even go so far as to say he is one of the half-dozen greatest living poets. One of the main reasons for this is because he cannot be easily categorized. Certainly he is part of the extraordinary contemporary band of bards from his native land Ireland, who has also successfully assimilated himself here in America. But he is also an ORIGINAL. He may be easy to overlook or even condescend to--but so was Gerard Manley Hopkins for many years. And Christina Rossetti, Stephen Spender and Thom Gunn have still not received everything they're due. The Dutch painters, a main source of inspiration for Grennan, didn't clobber anybody with their technique and opinions either. "Woman with Pearl Necklace (Vermeer)," which appears in the New Poems section of the book, is the masterwork of his dedication to that school; it begins: "Since he painted her, she will always be putting this pearl necklace on...." The poem is as fully-realized and illuminating--and timeless--as the painting. Right from the beginning of the volume, the first poem, "Facts of Life, Ballymoney," one gets the idea this poet is after some kind of personal grace, rather than trendiness or easy solutions. ("I would like to let things be:/ The rain comes down on the roof/ The small birds come to the feeder/ The waves come slowly up to the strand.") And I can't help wondering if Grennan doesn't attract more attention because he accepts his place as a voluble part of the larger world, without losing his honest sense of self--which sometimes means expressing the darker emotions, especially present, with different kinds of shading, in the most recent work. It's as if he somehow miraculously kept fresh in mind a student's passions for poetry, or Jude the Obscure's feelings of awe and modesty instead of puffing himself up in later life. As If It Matter is a favorite book of mine (although Grennan arguably gets richer and more complex in So It Goes.) When I re-read the book, I don't crave anything else. See: "Two Climbing", "Circlings," "Walk, Night Falling, Memory of My Father", "Sea Dog", "Breakfast Room", and the list goes on. "The Cave Painters" ("We'll never know if they worked in silence/ like people praying--the way our monks/ illuminated their own dark ages...") is one of my very favorite poems. I get shivers just thinking about it. I have found that I have unconsciously memorized many of the poems in this collection; they are close to my heart. I have had the pleasure of meeting and knowing Eamon, and I find him as unspoiled and generous in real life. Like the wonderful poet Jean Valentine, Grennan may be criticized for, or even feel guilty about, not being more explicitly political. But his (and her)concern bypasses and subverts various camps and allegiances, although he cetainly keeps well-informed, to create a deeper dialectic. I really believe in this poet, I thoroughly enjoying reading him, and that's all I need.

... The great Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837) is radiant again in a fresh translation, "Leopardi: Selected Poems" ... that appeared just as Iris Origo's marvelous 1935 biography, "Leopardi, A Study in Solitude" ... was reissued. Leopardi's birth into an aristocratic Tuscan family was no protection against a case of scoliosis that left him hunchbacked, a permanent invalid, unlovable in the eyes of any woman he might come to love. Yet his poetic world is often as enchanting and full of health as a convalescent's, for whom all things come alive, and "roofs and meadows and little hills / Are shining in the sun." Leopardi celebrates such moments of renewal and delight, though his self-forgetful pleasures always return him to a lonely prison. But this is the human condition, not just the poet's. Nature "drives all things to their destruction," the "feast-day is over in a flash, / The work-day comes on, and time takes away / All we are and do." So, he asks, why not love one another? Why turn cold or quarrel, when death sweeps everyone into darkness?

Introducing a poet who divulged the voice of exclusion seems a bit of a paradox, yet it is precisely what his valiant translator seems to suggest to be doing given the relative want of interest that presently he has been receiving in the U.S. The translation is successfully carried out to the extent that the mood is respected and the melancholy distance is imparted rather faithfully. The resulting exposition of Leopardi's inestimable poetry bears the stamp of a poet who is in tune with his subject and displays considerable lyrical dexterity. However for all the agility that is here employed - so as to reproduce a work akin with the original - as always it inevitably does not do justice to the tremor that transpires through the Italian undulating and langorous resonance. The syntax is also essential to understanding the reach of this poet that only Holderlin, Rilke and Trakl may be said to have deployed a similar structural approach. Giorgio Agamben's book "Language and Death," would be a good source for English readers to "get a feel" of the poet's startling implosion of loss; the subtle fragility of his theory of noia (tedium); the whole of it punctuated with and surging, tentalizing strokes that emerge in the illuminations of village damsels, of frolicsome lads or of the naively insouciant Silvia. The poems herein abound with familiar illustrations of pastoral life and of the sublime that most all Romantic poets resorted to; The fashion in which Leopardi was able to express such aloofness and despair is tragic, brilliant and engagingly dispassionate. In the words of Oliver Goldsmith: "We cannot hesitate to say that in almost every branch of mental exertion, this extraordinary man seems to have had the capacity of attaining, and generally at a single bound, the very highest exellence. Whatever he does, he does in manner that makes it his own; not with a forced or affected, but a true originality. stamping on his work, like other masters, a type that defies all counterfeit." Amoungst others Nietzsche had the daring to translate Leopardi's poetry. These poets shared much more than simply a common profession in Philology...they were far too profound for anyone to fathom the abyss which they ceaselessly foundered within so as to dolcify the excesses of our tragic sense of life.

giacomo leopardi is an incredibly fascinating and yet somewhat obscure figure, and anyone who avoids his poetry because of it's pessimism or nihilism is really missing out. at times he becomes unbearably depressing and this is certainly a turn off past a point, but we should admire him nonetheless for his candor and commitment to expressing what he believed was truth. his bleak outlook on human life, contrary to popular belief, did not necessarily stem from his individual misfortunes (such as becoming a hunchback) or personal misery. he was simply a brilliant, lucid man who was aware that human life is ephemeral and without ultimate justification or meaning. anyone with the slightest bit of poetic or philosophical sensitivity to the nearly unfathomable miracle of the world and our lives can immediately understand where he is coming from. in any case, whether you are an optimist or a pessimist, you cannot afford to miss out on leopardi's work.

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.