Reviews of Relations

“Whether he is describing the flight of swifts over Dublin, the sight of his children in yellow macs climbing over cliff rocks, or his passage through a ‘a bright bead-curtain of rain,’ Grennan is a writer of plainspoken reverence. This book presents fifteen years of his poetry, whose effect is like afternoon light hitting ordinary objects: it illuminates, clarifies, and directs our gaze toward what it is we love but often overlook.”—The New Yorker

“In Grennan’s best poems, and there are many in this collection, the precision of his observations renders the embodied lives of others with gripping lucidity.” —Publishers Weekly

“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. To read him is to be led on a walk through the natural world of clover and cricket and, most of all, light, and to face with an open heart the complexity of being human.” —Billy Collins

“Eamon Grennan is a kind of Celtic amphibian, at home both in Ireland and America. He has the eye of a painter, the quiet ferocity of a Bonnard or Vermeer, intent on transfixing the moment. He has developed a long crackling line, with sentences like whiplashes, making poems that seem at once both mobile and at rest.” —John Montague