Kirjahaku

Poetry. 2018 Vermont Book Award Finalist. Poems and translations by Greg Delanty chosen and introduced by Archie Burnett. "A sense of vital, actual experience is in fact wonderfully sustained in Delanty's verse in its notable linguistic energy, product of a distinctive fusion of a literary lexicon (even Latinate at times) with contemporary demotic, Cork argot, Irish language phrases, place names, craft cant and North American slang (baseball lingo in one poem, 'Tagging the Stealer'). The language of his verse functions indeed as the verbal equivalent of the printer's hellbox (subject of one of the finest of Delanty's poems), which the poet tells us 'was a container in which worn or broken type was thrown to be melted down and recast into new type.' For in Delanty's work a world in constant transition (the 'simultaneous going and comings of life') is realized in a vocabulary and variegated tonal register that displays language itself in the process of being re-made."--Terence Brown

In ""Home from Home,"" Greg Delanty encapsulates an immigrant's lament: ""I'm in a place, but it is not in me."" A native of Ireland who now spends much of his time in the United States, Delanty has assembled in Southward a collection of poems whose settings are predominantly Cork City and County Kerry, in the southernmost part of the Irish Republic, a region warmed by the Gulf Stream and by a people whose language is as vivid as the area's abundant wild fuchsia. In ""The Fuchsia Blaze,"" Delanty writes: The purple petticoated & crimson frocks of the open flowers are known as Dancers, blown by the fast & slow airs of the wind; one minute sean-nós melancholy, the next jigging & reeling like Irish character itself & like these, my fuchsia verse, struggling to escape the English garden & flourish in a wilder landscapeIn many of the poems Delanty evokes the Ireland that was and is, while in others he mourns the loss of a lover, the death of his father, separation from his mother. In ""The Emigrant's Apology,"" through a haunting image of a black-scarfed woman worshiping alone, he describes his mother, who, with the loss of her husband and the scattering of her family, is a symbol of the grief of separation from his mother. In ""The Emigrant's Apology,"" through a haunting image of a black-scarfed woman worshiping alone, he describes his mother, who, with the loss of her husband and the scattering of her family, is a symbol of the grief of separation. Always home in the natural world, even in his adopted landscape, Delanty closes the book with a handful of poems set in the United States. The imagery of these latter poems ranges from a quiet pond in southern Florida to a military base on the border of Canada, and their concerns range from the personal to the political.

The poems in The Blind Stitch interweave family, marriage, love, and friendship into a larger world of public life. Set in Greg Delanty's native Ireland, in America, and in India, the book is sewn together with two main conceits and arranged thematically in the form of a palindrome. One of the conceits is that of the leper, which concerns personal and public suffering and complicity; the other is that of needlework, the threads that run through our public and private lives, seen and unseen, stitching us all together.

The poems in The Blind Stitch interweave family, marriage, love, and friendship into a larger world of public life. Set in Greg Delanty's native Ireland, in America, and in India, the book is sewn together with two main conceits and arranged thematically in the form of a palindrome. One of the conceits is that of the leper, which concerns personal and public suffering and complicity; the other is that of needlework, the threads that run through our public and private lives, seen and unseen, stitching us all together.

The Ship of Birth records a father's responses in the time immediately be­fore and after the birth of his child. Just as material significant to the dead is placed in a ship of death, so this ship of birth contains what is signifi­cant to the child: the wonder and trepidation of the parents, reflections on the nature of the soul, thoughts on the future growth of the child. Greg Delanty's poems draw on his experiences in American and Irish cultures, using the traditional verse structures of seventeenth-century religious poets along with open modern colloquial forms to evoke the subtle inter­connections of the past and future. Delanty acknowledges the dark and difficult reality that the child faces, while affirming the sustaining conti­nuity of life.

Purporting to be a ""lost"" seventeenth book of the 16-volume Anthologia Graeca, Book Seventeen uses the themes and images of ancient mythology to conjure a new way of looking at our modern world. Gods of all types line the pages of this collection, from those deities that only operate in our personal spaces-the poet's companion, the demigod Solitude, as well as the elusive god of Complicity-to more familiar divinities in unfamiliar roles, such as Helios shopping in an outdoor market in Paris, or an aging Aphrodite in a short skirt chatting with visitors to an unfamiliar city. Pithy and humorous, reverential and impudent, Greg Delanty's poems showcase the author's keen eye for the mythologies on which we depend to make sense of our messy, bewildering lives.

In No More Time, Greg Delanty offers a celebration of the natural environment that also bemoans its mistreatment at the hands of humans. The collection's long sequence, "A Field Guide to People," is an alpha-bestiary of twenty-six sonnets, each a meditation on a species of flora or fauna that is thriving, endangered, or extinct. Evoking an earthly heaven, purgatory, and hell for plants and animals, these poems function also as love letters to the biosphere as they connect the past with the present in both form and content. In the middle of this sonnet sequence, a section labeled "Breaking News" gives voice in poetry to the political state of our planet with a balance of pathos, wit, and hope. Delanty stresses the deep underlying connections within and between the natural world and humankind, rather than the fragmented world stressed at the beginning of the twentieth century. No More Time witnesses the effects of climate change and presents a vital view of what remains at stake for engaged global citizens in the twenty-first century.

The Professor of Forgetting, a new collection from the acclaimed Irish poet Greg Delanty, swings back and forth on the fulcrum of what we call "now" and confronts our notion of how time passes. From the very first poem, "Going Nowhere Fast," which ponders whether we are now here or going nowhere, to the final selection, from which the book takes its self-reflective title, these exuberant poems chronicle what it means to be human with joy, pathos, honesty, despair, sorrow, celebration, and wit. Structurally diverse in form, the poems also explore a range of poignant topics, including childhood, family, love, racism, the natural world, immigration, and the unavoidability of death. Often humorous, Delanty's poetry finds ways of coping with the challenges of life, as it makes lasting art out of heartbreaking difficulty and experience.

Elegies for the Irish poet Liam O Muirthile written by Greg Delanty.