Picking Straightforward Methods For Proteus Roofing

This testimonial of Eamon Grennan, Still Life with Waterfall (Gallery Works, 2001; Graywolf Press,
2002) first showed up in The Irish Literary Supplement, Volume 22, Number 1 (Springtime 2003), p.
14.

Ironically, given the density of its prose, the "Proteus"

episode of Ulysses may give critical backshadowing
for the vision notifying Eamon Grennan's absolutely
shining-- sometimes also numinous-- book of poems
Still Life with Falls. "Ineluctable method of the
visible," Stephen Dedalus muses to himself:
"Trademarks of all factors I am right here to review,
seaspawn and also seawrack, the nearing trend, that
rusty boot." In lots of respects "Proteus" checks out as
James Joyce's very own musing, by means of G. E.
Lessing's Laocoon, on the connection between the world placed under arrest Nebeneinander-- that
is, spatially, items side by side-- as well as the verbal artist's needed expression of that world
Nacheinander-- that is, temporally, through words provided one after another: "the ineluctable
technique of the audible." Of training course, Joyce himself contests Lessing's categorical
differences in the ensuing episodes of Ulysses, regularly complexing the viewers's expectation of the
direct nature of narrative.
Much more broadly, nonetheless, "Proteus" includes exactly what might be the innate business of
verse poetry: the effort to acknowledge-- with the attempt to record in words-- the absolutely
protean personality of human sensation, feeling, intellection. Robert Fitzgerald's making of Proteus
Roofing Eidothea's guidance worrying the sea divine being Proteus that Menelaus shares with
Telemachus in Book IV of The Odyssey describes this enterprise: "If you could possibly take him by
shock and hold him,/ he 'd give you program and proximity for your cruising/ homeward throughout
the cold fish-breeding sea." Tellingly, the opening poem of Still Life with Waterfall opens up with a
powerful graphic out of nature that symbolizes symbolically the endeavor of the lyric writer: "On
sluggish wings the marsh hawk is patrolling/ opportunity." Labelled "At Job," the poem reads readily
not simply as a graphic recording of ruthless beauty however likewise as a symbolic depiction of
creative pursuit and implementation-- of a literary recording as well as reconstituting of (effectively)
"that scuttling minutiae of skin and also vital organs,/ its hot rhythm hammering/ that moved so
quick as well as soundless/ and also sure of itself, simply a min back, in the safeguarding yard.".
Going after such "probability" in rhyme after rhyme, Grennan also stimulates at times a specifying
stylistic attribute of the "Proteus" episode. In "Grid," for instance, taping exactly how "A deer in the
industry of early morning, tan layer gleaming--/ stares till he views just what you are, then a
substantial/ expulsive whufff and also he's dolphining environment-friendly waves/ to a safer
distance," he could possibly almost be evoking Joyce's glossing for his pal Frank Budgen of his
creating the word "almosting": "That's all in the Protean personality of things. Everything changes:
land, water, canine, time of day. Components of speech adjustment, too. Adverb ends up being verb."
Noting in "Cold weather Morning" exactly how "the 8 o'clock light modification [s]/ from charcoal to
a pale gassy blue, designing things," Grennan-- like Joyce before him-- seeks both the language as
well as the complementary type whereby to sign up the limitless changeability of outer and inner

globes: of phenomenal encounter and of the individual's celebration and processing of that
encounter.
Grennan finds-- or designs-- the extremely kind for having the ever-shifting strength of language: an
unrhymed and also rhythmically supple nonce verse of thirteen lines that itself confirms "protean" in
his hands. Without a doubt, the impact of Grennan's twenty-two thirteen-liners (sprinkled amongst
the fifty-two rhymes in the quantity) resides fairly essentially in between that developed by Paul
Muldoon's plenty of deconstructive renovations of the traditional fourteen-line form of the sonnet as
well as Seamus Heaney's forty-eight innovative twelve-liners which make up "Squarings" in Seeing
Things. Sometimes (like Muldoon) cracking down the formal structure into discrete strophes to
reinforce the rhetorical structure of the poem, Grennan yet continually attains (like Heaney) that
ideogrammatic compression idealized by Ezra Pound: the presentation of "an intellectual and also
emotional complex in an immediate of time." A solitary sinuous sentence, the last rhyme of Still Life
with Falls both verbalizes and also shows the efficiency of Grennan's newly found kind; noting a
robin's bullying of a finch cut brief by the lethal strike of a sparrowhawk, Grennan concludes: "and
also I started to comprehend/ just how a rhyme can take place to you: you have your eye on a small/
elusive information, seeking its songs, when a terrible truth/ strikes and your heart bursts into tears
out, being completed.".