On Thursday, April 28, New World Writers Night presents poet Eamon Grennan. Readings take place at New World Home Cooking, 1411 Route 212, between Woodstock and Saugerties. This reading will begin promptly at 7, so please arrive by 6:30 for dinner. Readings include an open mic (5 minute limit) which can be poetry or prose. No admission charge; we take a voluntary collection for the writers. Attendees who wish to have dinner before the reading can call 246-0900 for reservations.
Eamon Grennan 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.
[su_quote cite=”Billy Collins”]Eamon Grennan is a glowing example of the poet-as-naturalist. The only thing better than reading his poems is going for a walk with the man himself in the woods or along the shore where he can name for you every bird, every flower, plant, and weed.
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 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. [/su_quote]
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
where a cormorant was feeding and submarining in the bay
and a heron rose off a boulder where he’d been invisible,
drifted a little, stood again — a hieroglyph
or just longevity reflecting on itself
between the sky clouding over and the lightly ruffled water.
This was the morning after your dream of dying, of being held
and told it didn’t matter. A butterfly went jinking over
the wave-silky stones, and where I turned
to go up the road again, a couple in a blue camper sat
smoking their cigarettes over their breakfast coffee (blue
scent of smoke, the thick dark smell of fresh coffee)
and talking in quiet voices, first one then the other answering,
their radio telling the daily news behind them. It was warm.
All seemed at peace. I could feel the sun coming off the water. –Eamon Grennan
