Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Eamon Grennan’s “Start of March, Connemara” is a vividly descriptive and evocative poem dedicated to the memory of Elizabeth Bishop. It captures the stark beauty and raw power of the Connemara coastline in early March, drawing connections between the natural world and the human experience of memory and loss.

The poem opens with a striking comparison: “The wind colder even than March in Maine, though the same sea.” This juxtaposition sets the tone for a poem that will explore both the familiar and the foreign, the harshness and beauty of the natural world. The description of the sea as “your greens of mutton-fat jade and bleached artichoke” is particularly evocative, combining vivid color imagery with a tactile sense of texture and substance. The sea, “thumbed, wind-scumbled,” with its “heroic white manes blown to bits at the shoreline,” is depicted as a dynamic, almost living entity, its power and movement rendered in a way that feels both grand and intimate.

The poem then shifts to focus on the birds, particularly the white gulls and a lone cormorant. The gulls are described as “surfing the sou’wester,” their ability to navigate the wind depicted as almost supernatural, “angels of the shiverblast.” This image conveys both their fragility and their mastery of their environment. The cormorant, on the other hand, is all about purpose and intensity, “plunging headlong into his own unknown future.” This sense of forward motion and determination contrasts with the speaker’s own actions, who “go[es] back the way I came along wet sand that’s glistening with relief.” The erasure of the speaker’s footprints, “writ in water,” serves as a powerful metaphor for impermanence and the transient nature of human existence.

Grennan’s use of rock, water, and air as the poem’s primary elements underscores the poem’s exploration of the natural world’s constancy and changeability. The “buffeting air” is something the “rain-plovers pay no mind to,” their collective rise and flight described as a moment of shared, instinctual joy and excitement. The phrase “glitterwings making their mark against green gape-water, then gone” captures the ephemeral beauty of the birds’ flight, a brief but luminous moment against the vast and unyielding backdrop of the sea.

In dedicating the poem to Elizabeth Bishop, Grennan invokes her legacy as a poet deeply attuned to the nuances of place and the interplay between the external world and internal experience. The poem’s detailed observations and its reflection on the passage of time and the act of remembering echo themes central to Bishop’s work.

“Start of March, Connemara” is a meditation on the beauty and harshness of the natural world, the persistence of memory, and the fleeting nature of human presence. Grennan’s precise and vivid imagery, coupled with his contemplative tone, creates a poignant and richly textured homage to both the landscape of Connemara and the enduring influence of Elizabeth Bishop.

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