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.

Oedipus at Colonus: Sophocles (Greek Tragedy in New Translations)

Literature & Fiction

Grennan, Eamon

SOPHOCLES

Kitzinger, Rachel

Dramas & Plays

Oxford University Press

What Light There Is and Other Poems

What Light There is and Other Poems

Poetry

NORTH POINT PRESS

Collects lyrical, meditative, and descriptive poems dealing with the beauty of nature, family and domesticity, and complexities of love

North Point Pr

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.

Nine Irish Plays for Voices

Fordham University Press

As If It Matters

A collection of poems, including "Two Climbing," "Compass Reading," "Diagnosis," "Woman Holding a Balance," and "That Ocean"

Contemporary

Graywolf Press

A collection of poems, including "Two Climbing," "Compass Reading," "Diagnosis," "Woman Holding a Balance," and "That Ocean"

Literary

Eamon Grennan is a writer who is able to find sensuality in the small gestures of the world--in the look of a firefly, the sound of a step, the tastes of a meal, the rhythm in things. A poet of immediacy and surprise, Grennan can turn our eye to objects caught in the light and suddenly transformed.In So It Goes, Grennan maps a spiritual geography for the middle of life's journey: ahead he sees the dark thickets of mortality; behind, the vulnerability of childhood. This is a brilliant collection--at once celebratory and elegiac--by a poet whose work has been described as the "verbal equivalent of 17th century Dutch paintings."

So It Goes: Poems

This first major collection of Eamon Grennan's work ranges from delicate early lyrics to poems that explore in larger meditations the complex realms of family, the natural world, and love. Throughout, the poetry is marked by what Grennan refers to in one poem as "a fathoming/depth of attention anchored in the heart." Edward Hirsch has said that "as a poem of dailiness, Grennan tries to fix and nail things down even as the world melts before him." It is this sharp and profound double awareness of the solidity and fluency of things that is Grennan's most recognizable signature. These are poems that in the minute fidelity of their images and the refined mastery of their language prompt us to experience at a higher frequency the world we mostly take for granted.

Relations: New and Selected Poems

Still Life with Waterfall
Whether attending to a painting, a moment of love, or a hawk hunting over marshland, Eamon Grennan, in the words of the poet and critic Cal Bedient, "presents the commonplace in so luminous a spirit that it spreads meaning, by analogy, into our own lives." In this bold collection, Grennan widens his poetic gaze on the natural world and brings sharp focus to moments of intimacy, capturing in fresh verse the age-old connections between lovers.

Still Life with Waterfall: Poems

The latest collection by Irish poet Eamon Grennan, winner of the 2003 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prizewe have to be at home here no matter what no matter what the shivering belly says or the dry-salted larynx no matter the frantic pulse no matter what happens―from "[because the body stops here . . . ]"The poems in Eamon Grennan's The Quick of It―each one without title and compacted into ten taut lines―are rendered with exquisite detail and reverence for the everyday elements of weather, landscape, family, art, questions. Grennan's poems are persistent amplified acts of attention, proving with every detail―light glancing off stone, an orange stem framing a Chardin still life, the contours of the body trapping the mind―that we are our best selves when we are most alert.

The Quick of It: Poems

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Grennan, Eamon. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Grennan, Eamon

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Grennan, Eamon. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Oedipus at Colonus: Sophocles (Greek Tragedy in New Translations)

What Light There is and Other Poems

What Light There Is and Other Poems

Nine Irish Plays for Voices

As If It Matters

As If It Matters

So It Goes: Poems

Relations: New and Selected Poems

Still Life with Waterfall: Poems

The Quick of It: Poems