Grennan's new collection shows again his powers of close, patient, plainspoken observation. Whether his gaze falls on the dash of a hare, dive of a gannet, heavy stillness of a rain-flecked cow, the song of a lark, or the scurry of an ant across a page of Celan, the poem that emerges is a celebration of the momentary fact, how a particular detail can, when sufficiently attended to, glow with the truth of its own unrepeatable self. Set mostly in the landscape of coastal Connemara, these poems can also bring to vivid life a painting by Bonnard, a family walk, a childhood memory, a chance encounter, a man scything a field, or a brief probing of the work of Beckett. Paying attention is this poet's credo, coaxing his simple but layered, often interrogative language into revealing shapes. Grennan also chooses the repeated format of the poems themselves (justified right and left margins of different widths), aligning accident with design, choice with chance, to articulate his sense of the world as an energy poised dynamically between fact and form, between the time-anchored data of the world and the shaping rapture of art. These are poems that serve-through their intensely observed details and the rich, patient exactitudes of Grennan's language-to sharpen our own habits of attention, renewing our sense of the often unnoticed worlds around us.

A vibrant collection of short plays bringing Irish history and culture alive through an extraordinary collage of documents, songs, poems, and texts. In Nine Irish Plays for Voices, award-winning poet Eamon Grennan delves deep into key Irish subjects—big, small, literary, historical, political, biographical—and illuminates them for today’s audiences and readers. These short plays draw from original material centering on important moments in Irish history and the formation of the Irish Republic, such as the Great Famine and the Easter Rising; the lives of Irish literary figures like Yeats, Joyce, and Lady Gregory; and the crucial and life-changing condition of emigration. The rhythmic, musical, and vivid language of Grennan’s plays incorporates traditional song lyrics, lines of Irish poetry, and letters and speeches of the time. The result is a dramatic collage that tells a story through the voices of characters contemporary to the period of the play’s subject. By presenting subjects through the dramatic rendering of the human voice, the plays facilitate a close, intimate relationship between players and the audience, creating an incredibly powerful connection to the past. Historical moments and literary figures that might seem remote to the present-day reader or audience become immediate and emotionally compelling. One of the plays, Ferry, is drawn entirely from the author’s imagination. It puts unnamed characters who come from the world of twentieth-century Ireland on a boat to the underworld with the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. On their journey the five strangers, played by two voices, tell stories about their lives, raising the question of how language both captures and transforms lived experience. Addressing the Great Famine, Hunger uses documentary evidence to give audiences a dramatic feel for what has been a silent and traumatic element in Irish history. Noramollyannalivialucia: The Muse and Mr. Joyce is a one-woman piece that depicts James Joyce’s wife as an older woman sharing her memories and snippets from the works of her husband. Also included in this rich volume is the author’s adaptation of Synge’s Aran Islands, as well as Emigration Road, History! Reading the Easter Rising, The Muse and Mr. Yeats, The Loves of Lady Gregory, and Peig: An Ordinary Life.

The latest title to join the acclaimed Greek Tragedy in New Translations series, Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus tells the story of the last day in the life of Oedipus. It was written at the end of the fifth century BCE in Athens, in the final years of the "Golden Age" of Athenian culture, and in the last year of Sophocles' own life. At the center of the play is the mysterious transformation of Oedipus from an old and blind beggar, totally dependent on his daughters, to the man who rises from his seat and, without help, leads everyone to the place where he is destined to die. In the background of this transformation stands the grove of the Furies, the sacred place of the implacable goddesses who pursue the violators of blood relationships. Although Oedipus, who killed his father and married his mother, is an obvious target of the Furies' vengeance, he enters their grove at the beginning of the play, sure that it is the resting place Apollo has predicted for him. The reversals and paradoxes in the play speak to the struggle that Oedipus' life and the action of the play bring vividly before us: how do we as humans, subject to constant change, find stable ground on which to stand and define our moral lives? Sophocles offers his play as a witness to the remarkable human capacity to persevere in this struggle.

These translations of the major poems of Giacomo Leopardi (1798--1837) render into modern English verse the work of a writer who is widely regarded as the greatest lyric poet in the Italian literary tradition. In spite of this reputation, and in spite of a number of nineteenth-and twentieth-century translations, Leopardi's poems have never "come over" into English in such a way as to guarantee their author a recognition comparable to that of other great European Romantic poets.

By catching something of Leopardi's cadences and tonality in a version that still reads as idiomatic modern English (with an occasional Irish or American accent), "Leopardi: Selected Poems" should win for the Italian poet the wider appreciative audience he deserves. His themes are mutability, landscape, love; his attitude, one of unflinching realism in the face of unavoidable human loss. But the manners of the poems are a unique amalgam of philosophical toughness and the lyrically bittersweet. In a way more pure and distilled than most others in the Western tradition, these poems are truly what Matthew Arnold asked all poetry to be, a "criticism of life." The translator's aim is to convey something of the profundity and something of the sheer poetic achievement of Leopardi's inestimable "Canti."