Eamon Grennan, an Irish-born poet who now teaches in this country, is a master of observing and writing about nature’s small details. In “Watch,” however, he uses those details in the service of just another tired poem about his inability to preserve those details in a poem.

Over the many years that I have read Grennan’s poetry, I have noticed more of a tendency recently to rely on artificial means to get “into” the business of writing a poem. This poem is no exception. Its opening line quoting a note the narrator has pinned above his writing desk reminds him that a writer must watch nature closely and respect its mystery. Please, Mr. Grennan, show me, don’t tell me.

When a poet writes a poem saying that he really can’t capture nature, he should, I think, write a poem that does, in fact, capture nature, thereby giving the lie to his stated theme. Grennan, it seems, has chosen a different route, writing a poem that illustrates his inability to capture nature in words.

In the first stanza, for example, he describes the “hum of bees in the pink fuchsia” echoed in the sound of the narrator’s “own blood coursing its steady laps / and speaking in beats to the drum of your left ear.” “Left ear” strikes a discordant note. Is he saying that he’s going a little deaf, unable to completely “hear” nature’s sound as he used to? Whether this was a deliberate off-note by Grennan or not, it certainly wrecked the mood he was beginning to create in the first stanza.

Parts of the second stanza strike similar discordant notes, especially Grennan’s use of “and so on” to describe the movement of the sycamore leaf from seed to “fructive dust.” And it seems to me that the writer is doing an awful lot of sitting and watching nature from inside at his “heavy Dutch table” as he observes the leaf brown, dry, drop, and be blown away.

Grennan also misses when he states that when he watches the leaf change, “the mystery that is its movement” from seed to fructive dust “holds still an instant.” How can a mystery that takes place over several months “hold still an instant”? I know what Grennan is trying to say about the difficulty of being able to capture nature’s mystery in words (see also quantum mechanics and the idea that matter is both wave and particle), but I wish his own words didn’t illustrate that difficulty so glaringly.

ONE MORNING by Eamon Grennan

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 and 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.

FENCEPOSTS by Eamon Grennan

Inside each of these old fenceposts
fashioned from weathered boughs and salt-
bleached branches
(knotholes, wormy ridges, shreds of bark still visible)
something pulses with a life that lies outside our language:
for all their varicose veins and dried grain lines,
these old-timers know how to stand up
to whatever weather swaggers off the Atlantic or
over the holy nose of Croagh Patrick to ruffle
the supple grasses with no backbone which seem
endlessly agreeable, like polite, forbearing men
in a bar of rowdies. Driven nails, spancels
of barbed wire, rust collars or iron braces – the fenceposts
tighten their grip on these and hang on, perfecting
their art and craft of saying next to nothing
while the rain keeps coming down, the chapping wind
whittles them, and the merciless sun
just stares and stares: yearly the shore is eaten away
and they’ll dangle by a thread until salvaged
and planted again in the open field, which they bring
to an order of sorts, showing us how to be at home
and useful in adversity, and weather it.

In the following, I think Chardin and Grennan do a better job of capturing the difference between nature and art drawn from nature.

A LEAF FROM CHARDIN by Eamon Grennan

By leaving, always, a single stem and leaf on that Seville orange
Chardin gave us a lesson in framing: the spear-shaped, green and
Slightly curled form fixing a clean limit to the composition
In its lovely huddle of apples, goblet, pear, its two soberly corked
Wine bottles, one nut, and a solitary flat-shelled clam. It’s also
Possible he may have been attending to the way nature itself
Remains at the edge of everything, a real presence even in these
Absolute indoors of the eye, showing how the opaque radiance
Of the orange is still trailing and displaying its tree-life, its one last
Longing attachment to sunlight, pleine air, what’s out of the picture.

the seed that is to become the aplpe tree

it still in the apple

but still it is an apple tree in each bite that it taken

into the heart and soul of eve

and given to adam

i alsys will be the giver

and adam the eater

so who took that first bite

that took us aawy from paradise

and made all the mean insects, snakes and giant man eating bears

was it the lust of man or the

love of woman for the man

or just the simple fact that

in the beginning the world with apple leaves apple blossoms apples and apple trees began

I'm in overall agreement on your points, MA. I know Grennan is a good writer, but there is something hammy in his presentation of perception that stops me from liking his writing more. Perhaps it's the fact that he writes too much about nature for my tastes--I'm decidely an urban dude, uncomfortable with the lack of gas fumes and screaming neighbors--but also that he's the only one who might have
witnessed the small wonders of the natural world. Here, I find him especially uninspired, boring in fact, and the worst of it is that he sounds bored himself.

I know Grennan is a good writer, but there is something hammy in his presentation of perception that stops me from liking his writing more. Perhaps it's the fact that he writes too much about nature for my tastes -- I'm decidely an urban dude, uncomfortable with the lack of gas fumes and screaming neighbors

SMELL AND ENVY by Douglas Goetsch

You nature poets think you’ve got it, hostaged
somewhere in Vermont or Oregon,
so it blooms and withers only for you,
so all you have to do is name it: primrose
-- and now you’re writing poetry, and now
you ship it off to us, to smell and envy.

But we are made of newspaper and smoke
and we dunk your roses in vats of blue.
Birds don’t call, our pigeons play it close
to the vest. When the moon is full
we hear it in the sirens. The Pleiades
you could probably buy downtown. Gravity
is the receiver on the hook. Mortality
we smell on certain people as they pass.

MaryAnn:

Eamon Grennan, an Irish-born poet who now teaches in this country, is a master of observing and writing about nature’s small details. In “Watch,” however, he uses those details in the service of just another tired poem about his inability to preserve those details in a poem.

Over the many years that I have read Grennan’s poetry, I have noticed more of a tendency recently to rely on artificial means to get “into” the business of writing a poem. This poem is no exception. Its opening line quoting a note the narrator has pinned above his writing desk reminds him that a writer must watch nature closely and respect its mystery. Please, Mr. Grennan, show me, don’t tell me.

When a poet writes a poem saying that he really can’t capture nature, he should, I think, write a poem that does, in fact, capture nature, thereby giving the lie to his stated theme. Grennan, it seems, has chosen a different route, writing a poem that illustrates his inability to capture nature in words.

(...) I know what Grennan is trying to say about the difficulty of being able to capture nature’s mystery in words (see also quantum mechanics and the idea that matter is both wave and particle), but I wish his own words didn’t illustrate that difficulty so glaringly.

Hi MaryAnn,

Nice take! I've boldfaced the parts that stood out for me as particularly telling.

Of course, I don't believe it's all that hard to describe nature in words. (People do it all the time, and do it exceedingly well; just not this time around.) Moreoer, I believe that if one can master how one thinks about tense-aspect in ancient Hebrew, then one can master how to describe nature's mystery in words (including, and perhaps particularly, quantum mechanics and the idea that matter is both wave and particle). Or maybe I am biased in that I deal with Biblical Hebrew as a musician, too (given that the Masoretic accents add whole new dimensions of comprehension about tense-aspect).

Anyway, verbs in Biblical Hebrew have both tense and aspect -- and this has been compared to the wave-particle duality of matter. Most of the key to the verbal problem beyond that lies in the realization that Biblical Hebrew views action as the framework in which time happens, not time as the framework in which action happens. I wonder what would happen to contemporary physics if it took a similar point of view? To contemporary poetry, for that matter?

wr ()()

Very, very good. But I'd rather be a nature poet than a city poet. :)

Mary Ann - I have to agree with your evaluation. It felt simultaneously impersonal yet self-centered. Thanks for the Douglas Goetsch poem. I really like that one.