Plainchant
Set as justified rectangles of text, often comprising a single, elaborate sentence on a page, the poems in Eamon Grennan’s new collection Plainchant (“these plain words—to be taken out at times of need”) appear at first so plainly not plain that a reader may wonder if the book’s title is ironic. Grennan, an Irish poet who taught for many years at Vassar College, remains beautifully “knacky”—artful, cunning—about the miraculous abundance of the world, but his intention here is as “bright and see-through and hard at once” as the window-shaped form of these poems. As with the liturgical music called “plainchant,” he seeks an unaccompanied line, a “hoist of song,” to express the inexpressible: the “pure worldliness” of two horses, the “single thing of wonder” that is a gannet’s flight, a memory of his mother’s “simple solid nearness,” “the day I’m passing through that’s passing right through me.”
The plainness of Grennan’s “plainchant” resides in his forthright intention to recreate his own wonder through a poem’s wonder, so that he arrives at a kind of sacred song of verisimilitude. What he says of Bonnard’s painting comes close to his own artistic objectives:
[…] rooted,
modest, insistently assertive, endlessly astonishing,
once and for all all-comforting all-unsettling word-
defeating resurrection game.
The reality being resurrected in Grennan’s poetry is gorgeously detailed—some starlings’ “mottled widespread glimmer-net of wings,” three seals’ “small slick domes with an inset glitter of lava-black eyeballs”—but, as with any resurrection, it is a stay against “word-defeating” nothingness. In “Visitation,” a sycamore’s shadows provide an image of what Grennan’s work lavishly constructs, a place to stave off death itself through the fleeting gift of “ordinary light and time and space”:
[…] to stand even for an instant in this in-
between place—liminal and brimming with
possibility, as if some hapless ghost shook
off the grave that stayed it from ordinary
light and time and space, and offered itself
up in our here and now, making the day
stop beating quotidian time and hold its
breath […]