NEWS PROVIDED BY
Oct 08, 2014, 02:02 ET
BOSTON, Oct. 8, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- 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, "Greg Delanty and North America", Agenda, 2008
SELECTED DELANTY Poems and translations by Greg Delanty chosen and introduced by Archie Burnett (Un-Gyve Press). (PRNewsFoto/Un-Gyve Limited)
Following upon his Guggenheim Fellowship, Agenda devoted its Summer/Autumn issue in 2008 to the celebration of Greg Delanty's 50th birthday. In a sense it was a twain celebration, language being re-made and voice re-born by Atlantic Crossings.
Ulster people are British and Irish people are Irish, and never the twain shall meet.
An adaptation of
Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet
— Rudyard Kipling, 'Barrack-Room Ballads' (1892).
But what, when the twain meet, of Greg Delanty and North America.
Daniel John Gregory Delanty was born in Cork City, Ireland in 1958 and lived in Cork until 1986. He obtained United States citizenship in 1992 while retaining his Irish citizenship, returning for three months of each year to his home in Derrynane, County Kerry. He lives most of the year in Vermont where he teaches at St. Michael's College. Delanty attended University College Cork (UCC) where he edited the magazine Quarryman and published his first poems there and in The Cork Examiner. His books include Cast in the Fire (1986), Southward (1992), American Wake (1995), The Hellbox (1998), The Blind Stitch (2001), The Ship of Birth (2003), Collected Poems 1986 - 2006, The New Citizen Army(2010), and Loosestrife (2011). His latest collection, The Greek Anthology, Book XVII (Carcanet, 2012), listed as a TLS Book of the Year. Delanty won the National Poetry Competition in 1999, and, in addition to the 2007 Guggenheim Fellowship, the poet is the recipient of numerous other awards including the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award (1983), the Allen Dowling Poetry Fellowship (1986), the Austin Clarke Centenary Poetry prize in 1996, the Wolfers-O'Neill Award (1996–97), an Arts Council of Ireland Bursary (1998–99), and an award from the Royal Literary Fund (1999). His poems have been widely anthologized.
Un-Gyve Press is pleased to be publishing this first Selected Poems of Greg Delanty.
SOURCE Un-Gyve Limited
The Roger Lonsdale archive, at Balliol College, Oxford, includes his reflections, in 2005, on his poetry, with lists of his ninety poems—alphabetically by first lines, and chronologically—as well as his notebooks as a poet; and, at that time, he noted, in reference to these sixteen poems from Un-Gyve Press in a numbered, limited edition of seventy-five: “At present the following seem worth preserving for one reason or another.”