OLEAN, N.Y. — Eamon Grennan will read from his work at 7 p.m. April 21 at the Olean Public Library.
Grennan, a native of Dublin, has lived in the United States for more than 30 years.
He was educated at University College in Dublin and Harvard University. He taught at Vassar College until his retirement and lives currently in Poughkeepsie and spends time in the West of Ireland.
Robert Wrigley wrote of Grennan’s work: “Grennan would have us know — no, would have us see, feel, hear, taste, and smell — that the world, moment by ordinary or agonizing moment, lies chock-full with its own clarifications and rewards.”
Grennan has won most of the prestigious awards in poetry, including grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, The National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation.
His books include “Matter of Fact,” “The Quick of It, Still Life with Waterfall,” “Selected and New Poems,” “So It Goes, As If It Matters,” “What Light There Is and Other Poems,” “Wildly for Days,” and “Leopardi: Selected Poems.”
He said of his mixed citizenship, that he “was spending some time in Ireland to fit back into the Irish situation after having been out of it for a number of years, but at the same time, the influences I was feeling were American. I was reading, Bishop, Creely, Snyder, Roethke, James Wright, and a whole slew that were voices in my head that were of a real value to me, particularly when I spliced them with Patrick Kavanagh and some other Irish poets … So it was inevitable that I wrote out of an Irish psyche but one that had been transplanted and had been affected in some way, colored, by American voices.”
Grennan’s visit is sponsored by the Olean Public Library and by the New York State Council on the Arts with support from Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.
