The latest collection by Irish poet Eamon Grennan, winner of the 2003 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize

we have to be at home here no matter what no matter what the shivering belly says or the dry-salted larynx no matter the frantic pulse no matter what happens

—from “[because the body stops here . . . ]”


The poems in Eamon Grennan’s The Quick of It—each one without title and compacted into ten taut lines—are rendered with exquisite detail and reverence for the everyday elements of weather, landscape, family, art, questions. Grennan’s poems are persistent amplified acts of attention, proving with every detail—light glancing off stone, an orange stem framing a Chardin still life, the contours of the body trapping the mind—that we are our best selves when we are most alert.