Eamon Grennan, Plainchant, reviewed by Trevor Ruth
Look up the word “plainchant” in the dictionary, and it’ll tell you to look for “plainsong” in its stead. Logistically and denotatively, both words mean the same thing. However, a song is not exactly a chant, now is it? A song is a composition built from musical notes, words and patterns, a chant is something repeated, something that doesn’t fall within the confines of a rhythm, per se, but the repetition gives it its own groove. Eamon Grennan’s poetry collection, Plainchant embodies that ideal. It is not a war cry but rather it is a lovely appraisal to the plain on which many of the poems take place, always returning to the lush of Connemara and granting the reader a kind of holy expression that is repetitively beautiful.
Plainchant is the kind of poetry collection that I like to read: visual expanses that utilize poetic form to build something out of the abstract spaces between the smaller moments. To this end, each poem is shaped the same; columnar single stanzas that lead each thought down rabbit holes (sometimes literally) of stream of consciousness. The collection opens with “Encounter,” a poem about a hare—a motif in this collection—in the process of winding itself up and preparing to dash away. From there, Plainchant takes us on long walks down country roads, introducing us to characters from old memories and painting a portrait of the coast. Grennan’s use of descriptive language is utterly transcendent, both literally and philosophically. Despite the simplicity of each poem’s structure, the writing itself creates this beautiful pattern of abstract thought, born from imagery alone. Sometimes it gets lost in its description a bit though, like Whitman, there is something to be said with each passage of naturalistic expression.
Grennan likes to use earthy descriptors in his passages, colors that aren’t flat but carry a kind of natural texture to them, particularly in the “black eyes” of creatures in the thrush, which could either be onyx or basalt. A particular favorite of mine is “dark-charcoal mountain-flank of cloud” in the poem “Near High Tide.” “Nature Vivant: Just Looking” is also noteworthy or its use of textured color: “lilac and rose splotches along with eye-caressing zones of yellow” and “glinting galactical star-particles of random, untampered, onlie begetter light itself.” Grennan leaps from sharp singular hues to glittering forms that hold entire universes. Even when he searches the opposite end of the palette, he invents his color descriptors with a kind of nostalgia: “Two small, wall-brown butterflies” and “the rose-red of a single small geranium shivering in the window-box.” Often the poems of Plainchant are worth a second reading if only to simply comprehend the travails of his visual nuances.
If you couldn’t tell from these passages, Grennan is also a fan of compound terms, utilizing dashes to connect ideas to form new adjectives like, “foot-crushed” or “bird-voice-sweetened” which may come off as rudimentary, but give each poem its own sense of rhythm. The poem “Renvyle Couple” does this well, as it utilizes alliteration in mimicking the explosiveness of a bird’s take off: “the great loud water-slapping wing-flaps/leans all-forward to achieve liftoff, with its compass-wavering neck, intent head and massive white wing-rush.” One cannot help but rock their head back and forth while reading these opening lines, particularly when the alliteration comes into play near the end. Consequently, Grennan also shows his mastery over poetic form. In the poem, “Entering Omey with Rachel and Kira,” we’re introduced to list of sensory details that overload us so deeply that we have no choice but to confer with the “doubt-troubled souls” that the speaker grants us until we reach the water’s edge where “there’s the ease of going into a great silence.” This line marks a sudden relaxation of poetic language. The reader slows down, ponders a bit, walks side-by-side with Rachel and Kira, occupying the place of the poet-speaker. Suddenly, we are one with the ghosts of the “brown-cowled tonsured monks (wrapped against the cold of a wintry blast or the salt-burn of a good summer) circled chanting….” and we carry that history and heritage back with us.
Apart from reinventing language, Grennan looks to use each poem as a way to reach into the core of our reality on a spiritual level. To this end, there is a very Taoist approach to naturalism: “Grace” in particular, deconstructs the simple movement of a horse’s head into an act of contemplation as it regards the two states of its being. Often there is hardly any way for the speaker to explain this element of the creature’s true nature apart from deriving its necessity: “pure and simple horseness itself” which is kind of funny but also very sincere. I’m personally more impressed that Grennan was able to conjure a thirty-three line poem out of the movement of a horse’s head alone. “No Words” takes the horse-encounter to a whole other level as they become creatures beyond the base state of human experience, “they occupy a universe of time I can neither know or enter.”
Not every poem is a spiritual exhibition, however. Sometimes, Grennan simply grants us vignettes set in the countryside. I am a fan of the third poem, “Chance” which depicts a rather Freudian exchange between a pedestrian and a woman who likes to show off her—ahem—berries. “Sieve” acts as an ode to the speaker’s past self, reminiscing about his mother’s cooking and the way she used to occupy a kitchen with her entire being that is tender and everlasting, “the sound of that brown old wooden spoon scraping the wire mesh seeping into and settling…forever in my head.” I am also partial to the folkloric quality of “The Rain Maiden” and its fantastic description. How ingenious is it, as a collection, to include the more experimental pieces like “Rhyming with Beckett” before suddenly thrusting the reader back into the natural world with “Two Hares,” a poem that captures the transience of two states—life and death—with the theoretical division between the spirit and the body, and “Burial” which consecrates the gruesome nature of an animal’s slaughter and the eventual passiveness of such violence.
Just like the two realities it examines, Plainchant straddles the division between the narrative and the abstract. Grennan doesn’t exactly leave the serenity of the moment up to the reader to figure out for themselves, but he doesn’t hit the reader over the head with its meaning either. I can guarantee that if you attempt to read this poem in a coffee shop or even in a space with a lot of industrial sound, you are going to feel detached from the poetry itself. The best way to experience Plainchant to its fullest degree is in a quiet space; preferably outside where the appreciation for the rural imagery of the collection can impose itself on you and accompany you wherever you go.
The collection ends with “Hare at Dusk,” which is a brilliant bookend of a piece as it utilizes the same descriptive writing as “Encounter,” down to the opening line. Nothing miraculous happens in these poems—indeed, a hare appears and disappears—but it is Grennan’s poignancy with recollection that make these chance encounters come alive. Like a divine circle, the collection embodies the serenity of the Irish spirit and the conscious resurrection of that spirit. Like the monks locked in circled chanting, we carry this appreciation for the natural world with us, searching for the spaces between realities that we coinhabit, sometimes by surprise. Having read Plainchant once over, I read it a second time outside, on my patio. It was a calm day with the sun falling over everything and the quiet of the afternoon broken only by the sound of a lawn mower from next door. Above me the clouds wavered into warm gray swabs and the world around me seemed infinitesimal and silent before—wouldn’t you know it—out from a neighboring shrub, a rabbit reared its tiny head.
Eamon Grennan, Plainchant, Red Hen Press, 2022