Eamon Grennan

Born in Dublin, Eamon Grennan attended boarding school at a Cistercian monastery. He met Derek Mahon and Eavan Boland as an undergraduate at University College, Dublin, spent a year in Rome, and then came to the United States to earn his PhD at Harvard. He began writing poetry in earnest in 1977 and published his first collection, Wildly for Days, in 1983. He is the author of more than 10 collections of poetry, including There Now (2016), Out of Sight: New and Selected Poems (2010), Matter of Fact (2008), The Quick of It (2005), Still Life with Waterfall (2002), and Relations: New and Selected Poems (1998). Influenced by Williams, Hopkins, Patrick Kavanagh, Roethke, and Bishop, Grennan’s free verse lines often lean toward blank verse.

Cat Scat

I am watching Cleo listening, our cat

listening to Mozart's Magic Flute. What

can she be hearing? What

can the air carry into her ears like that,

her ears swivelling like radio dishes that

are tuned to all the noise of the world, flat

and sharp, high and low, a scramble of this and that

she can decode like nobody's business, acrobat

of random airs as she is? Although of course a bat

is better at it, sifting out of its acoustic habitat

the sound of the very shape of things automat-

ically—and on the wing, at that. The Magic Flute! What

a joy it is, I feel, and wonder (to end this little scat)

does, or can, the cat.

Published:

1988

Length:

Regular

Literary Movements:

Children's

Anthology Years:

2023

Themes:

Nature

Poems of the Everyday