Eamon Grennan’s voice from the stage was low, intimate and slightly scratchy, as if he were whispering his poems into your ear. It was a lovely effect, one which the audience quickly took a shine to, but induced by Grennan’s terrible respiratory affliction.

Eamon Grennan at the book signing table. Photo by Lee Waxman.

Sick as a dog, Grennan traveled to Columbia anyway, and read at HoCoPoLitSo’s 38th Annual Irish Evening of Music and Poetry last Friday. He knew, as a small organization with little fat in our budget, that HoCoPoLitSo would be floored if he didn’t read. So he coughed backstage, and before and after taping his appearance on The Writing Life (HoCoPoLitSo’s literary talk show), popped cough drops, mopped his nose and soldiered on.

HoCoPoLitSo, and its audience Feb. 19, was grateful, for his reading, his gentle humor and his poems about his native country and ours, the one he adopted fifty years ago. He still migrates every year between Poughkeepsie, where he taught for forty years at Vassar, and the west of Ireland.

Her Excellency Anne Anderson, the Irish ambassador, introduced Grennan as “deeply rooted in Ireland, yet totally versed in the international tradition.” Grennan, she said from the stage, “finds the extraordinary in the ordinary, and sacredness in the small moment.”

Judges agree. Poet Robert Wrigley noted, on awarding Grennan the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, that “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 a special way with poems about the natural world; several in the audience commented afterwards how much they loved “Listen,” a ruminative poem about cow conversation. Friday night’s audience laughed and clapped for his preamble to his disquieting poem, “Rats,”: “I’m usually kind to animals,” he said, with a wry smile.

Eamon Grennan. Photo by Lee Waxman.

At the last heartfelt line, “Come back and wish on us,” from his poem “Ladybird and Mother,” the audience burst into spontaneous applause. His superstitious mother, he said fondly, always wished on the tiny red and yellow spotted beetles that the Irish call “ladybirds,” and we call “ladybugs.”

Many in the audience nodded sadly when hearing his elegy to the late, great Irish poet Seamus Heaney (Nobel winner and HoCoPoLitSo guest three times). The poem “Sudden Dark” describes how Seamus himself would have found the sharp shards of light in the dark of mourning.

“Pulling light out of dark,” Grennan explained, “poetry is about recognizing both sides constantly.”

Grennan even read from William Butler Yeats’ controversial and beautiful poem, “Easter, 1916,” about the Easter uprising 100 years ago this April, and called it “the most responsible political poem in English.”

And he stayed late, signing every last seeker’s book, especially his latest, There Now, and chatting with Irish, American and English alike in the lobby. Finally, about 10:15 p.m., he gave up the ghost, and asked for a ride to his hotel. Unflaggingly grateful and polite, he chatted in the car about the crowd, migrating back and forth to Dublin, and his daughter’s career as a visual artist before he and his cough disappeared into the lobby.

Susan Thornton Hobby

Recording secretary

Bonus: Below you can enjoy the episode of HoCoPoLitSo’s The Writing Life that Mr. Grennan recorded in 1995 when he last visited Howard County. In the video, he is in conversation with Terence Winch.

Susan Hobby is a member of the HoCoPoLitSo board. Look for her Lit Up column here on the HoCoPoLitSo blog.

A play about three generations of stress in one household sounds like a downer: a divorced workaholic mother; two sisters, one shy and slightly chubby, one an embittered vet who lost her left hand in Irag; plus a grandmother dying of cancer.

So what are Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell doing up on stage vamping while the ladies toss back wine coolers and wear neon wigs?

I’m eager to find out. Rep Stage is producing the world premiere of Technicolor Life, by Jami Brandli, that centers around this mainly female family. Maxine, a slightly awkward freshman in high school, just wants to help her sister, Billie, who returned from Iraq with no left hand, plus the psychic wounds that come from combat and military sexual assault.

Maxine’s mother is an overworked attorney who drinks a bit too much, whose husband left her for a younger woman a few years ago. And Franny, Maxine’s grandmother, shows up after being kicked out of the assisted living facility where she had been living. Turns out, she’s dying of cancer. But she’s also a live wire who insists the family do things together before she kicks off.

So they watch old movies — especially Gentlemen Prefer Blondes — and work makeover miracles. Billie’s not having it; she runs 10 miles a day and slurps from her “water” bottle of vodka to kill the pain. Maxine, with the help of her new imaginary Blonde friends, finds Billie a fellow vet to date, and finds her voice. Meanwhile, Franny is arranging her euthanasia with Canadian drugs and her going-away party. Throughout, high school student Maxine practices her vocabulary words (serendipity, debonair, unique) and does reports for school on amputation, assisted suicide and turret gunners. Doesn’t sound like a barrel of laughs, but the play reads tragic comedy. Things do get better.

The play captures the awkward efforts of Maxine, the rage of post-traumatic stress syndrome, the yearning for connection between family members.

An ingenious part of the text — since I haven’t seen Technicolor Life staged, I have to imagine it — is the “playing field,” a real space onstage that illustrates the imagination. The playing field becomes a dance floor, a makeover space, Iraqi combat reenactments and even Internet dating site brought to life.
Part of the Horowitz Center’s “Year of the Woman,” Technicolor Life runs Oct. 21 to Nov. 8 in Rep Stage. For tickets visit www.repstage.org.

Emma Donoghue contains multitudes.

Emma Donoghue. Photo by Lee Waxman

The Irish novelist writes from the point of view of a five-year-old imprisoned with his mother (Room), a French erotic dancer in 1870s San Francisco (Frog Music), a Victorian spinster enmeshed in a friend’s nasty divorce (The Sealed Letter), and a formerly destitute prostitute and fashion fiend of the eighteenth century (Slammerkin).

On Feb. 6, HoCoPoLitSo’s 37th Annual Irish Evening of Music and Poetry featured Donoghue and her various voices. The Dublin-born novelist read from two books, her blockbuster Room and her latest, Frog Music.

The audience ate it up. Donoghue’s voice flipped from character to character as she read from Frog Music. During the dialogue, Donoghue’s voice changed from the rough Irish of the spreading Irish-American family MacNamara — the youngest boy to the frazzled mother and the slightly drunken father — to the accented lilt of a French-born erotic dancer Blanche, to the husky farmer bartender next door.

And when she read from Room, Donoghue mimicked the open-faced innocence and twisted grammar of a five-year-old. As the screenwriter for the independent film of her novel, due out in the fall of 2015, Donoghue said she thoroughly enjoyed sitting on set, keeping her mouth shut, as the actors brought her novel to life.

In her first introduction for HoCoPoLitSo’s Irish Evening, new Irish Ambassador Anne Anderson explained that a recent gala theme, “Ireland: Legendary and Contemporary,” made her think of Emma Donoghue. “Emma is a natural cosmopolitan. She moves easily in time and space and between historic and contemporary space. … She is a vivid narrator for our time.”

Earlier in the day, that vivid narrator sat down with D.C. novelist Mary Kay Zuravleff to film an edition of The Writing Life, HoCoPoLitSo’s writer-to-writer talk show (www.youtube.com/hocopolitso). The two writers laughed and talked about Donoghue’s work, which includes a dozen books of fiction, literary criticism, numerous short stories, plus several plays and radio dramas.

Donoghue spent her first 20 years in Dublin, “that early marinating leaves a mark,” she laughed, as the youngest of eight children.

“It made us competitive and loquacious,” she said. “It was a big and noisy, bookish house. My dad is a literary critic (Denis Donoghue, the Henry James professor at New York University).”

Her books, Donoghue explained, are “fiction that walks arm in arm with fact.”

Frog Music tells the story of a real unsolved murder from the point of view of Blanche, the “burlesque (to put it generously) dancer,” Donoghue says, a woman who is a new friend to the murder victim, Jenny Bonnet. Bonnet was, Donoghue says, “the ideal murder victim; she was born trouble.” The victim, a cross-dressing frog-catcher for San Francisco’s restaurants in the 1870s, and most of the characters in this novel, are based in a history that Donoghue meticulously researched.

Laura Yoo gets her book signed by Emma Donoghue. Photo by Lee Waxman

Room is the least fact-based of her novels, Donoghue told the audience, but did take its premise from a real headline — a young Austrian woman kept captive by her father, Josef Fritzl, who sired seven children with her and kept three of those children imprisoned as well. Donoghue says she thinks of Room as part fairy tale, part science fiction and “a bit like a nightmare.” Five-year-old Jack tells the story — imprisoned with his mother, Jack doesn’t know there is more to the world than the room in which they are captive, thanks to the protective, magical world his mother builds with him in their small space.

Donoghue said that she doesn’t like to repeat herself, so she sets up new challenges for herself. Her next project is a book for the middle school market — “I’m far more scared of them as an audience,” she laughed. They might throw spitballs, she laughed.

Friday night’s listeners didn’t throw anything but applause Donoghue’s way. And they clapped (and some danced) through the second half of the evening, the concert of traditional Irish music and step dancing by Narrowbacks and young dancers from the Culkin School.

The Irish Evening is a long-standing tradition that helps raise money for HoCoPoLitSo’s programs for adult and student audiences. We need your support to produce these kind of events. Please consider clicking our “donate” button on this page.

Susan Thornton Hobby
Recording secretary
Howard County Poetry and Literature Society board

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