Greg Delanty

Life
1958- ; b. Cork; son of a printer; ed. Scoil Chríost Rí, Coláiste Chríost Rí and UCC; issued Cast in the Fire (1986); winner of Patrick Kavanagh Award, 1987; appt. lecturer, St. Michael’s College, Vermont, 1987; visiting poet at the Robert Frost Place, New Hampshire, 1988; issued Southward (1992); issued American Wake (1994), on theme of emigration; issued The Hellbox (1998), based on printing idiom inspired by his printer-father; issued The Blind Stitch (2001); issued The Ship of Birth (2003); Collected Poems (2006); a 50th anniversary festschrift issue of Agenda appeared in 2008); he contribed to Longley at Seventy (2009); lives in America and teaches at St. Michael’s. OCIL

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Works
Collections
  • contrib. Raven Introductions, 4 (Duiblin: Raven Arts 1986), 112pp. [with Rosita Boland, et al.]
  • Southward: Poems (Dublin: Dedalus Press 1992), x, 48pp.
  • American Wake: Poems (Belfast: Blackstaff; Dufour 1995), 71[61]pp.
  • The Hellbox (Oxford Paperbacks 1998), 46pp.
  • The Blind Stitch [Oxford Poets] (Manchester: Carcanet Press 2001), 52pp.
  • The Ship of Birth (Manchester: Carcanet Press 2003), 62pp.; Do. [new edn.] (Louisiana State UP 2007), x, 55pp.
  • Collected Poems 1986-2006 (Manchester: Carcanet Press 2006), 244pp.
Miscellaneous
  • ed., with Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Jumping Off Shadows, with a preface by Philip O’Leary (Cork UP 1995), xxi, 257pp. [anthols. Paul Durcan, Michael Davitt, Roz Cowman, Theo Dorgan, Seán Dunne, Eileán Ní Chuilleanáin, and Colm Breathnach, with intro. and trans. of Irish poems].
  • trans., Selected Poems of Kyriakos Charalambides (Cork: Southword Editions 2005), 64pp.
  • Ed., with Robert Welch, New and selected poems of Patrick Galvin (Cork UP 1996), xix, 133pp.
  • ed., Seán Ó Riordain, The Collected Poems (Dublin: New Island Press 2007), 14pp.[?].
  • ed., with Michael Matto, The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation, foreword by Seamus Heaney (Norton 2011), [q.pp.; 70 poets contrib.]
  • ed., with Michael Matto, The word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation, with a foreword by Seamus Heaney] (NY & London: London: W. W. Norton & Co. [2011]), xvii, 557pp. [25cm].
Contribs.
  • ‘Poems’, in Fortnight Review (Oct. 1996), p.39 [“The Cure”, ded. ‘to my father’; “The Compositor”; “White Spirits”; “Mirror”].
  • “What is the Colour of Love”, in The Irish Times (19 Sept. 1998).

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Criticism
Patrick McCarthy, ed., Agenda: Atlantic Crossings- 50th Birthday Celebration for Greg Delanty (Agenda 2008), 261pp. [130pp. devoted to Delanty, incl. contribs. by Seamus Heaney, John Montague, et 21 al., and six critical essays].

Reviews, Thomas B. O’Grady, review of Greg Delanty, Southward (1992), Irish Literary Journal (Fall 1994), p.22; Brian Lynch, review of The Hellbox, in Irish Times, 27 March 1999.

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Commentary
Patrick Crotty, review of The Blind Stitch (2001): notes wobbly syntax and uncertain diction; elaborate figurative machinery, linking the Cork of his childhood with the India of a recent sojourn through the … leper priest Father Damien, to whom he was devoted as a boy. The poet’s mother’s remembered needlework connects to the sewing of children in Third World sweatshops and to the relentless poetic stitching of her son.’ (The Irish Times, 23 June 2001, Weekend.)

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Quotations
“US”: ‘Daily a sense of what you’ve become is brought home, / arrested by the sickly sweet air as I pass Yankee Candle / on Church Street, with its oleaginous rows / of candies made from oil, black blood of the earth. / A sense more striking now as I recall walking the streets / of Paris last week -the sepia, sun-sheened buildings / turning into the gold of the oak in autumn - that seemed to emit / a kind of oxygen. I felt like one of those creatures / who breathes through its skin as I crossed Boulevard St-Germain / to St-Michel and on up to the Pantheon, a city respiring / with the live dead as much as the living, /a great stone arboretum / giving off, it seemed, sustaining air. Live long enough / in a malodorous atmosphere and you hardly register its effluvium.’ (The Irish Times, 19 Feb. 2005, Weekend, p.10.)

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Notes
Translation Cork: Cork poets incl. Bernard O’Donoghue, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Theo Dorgan, Greg Delanty, Robert Welch, participated in Cork 2005 European translation series directed by Pat Cotter of the Munster Literature Centre.

Munster Writers: Greg Delanty appeared in In the Hands of Erato - a documentary produced and directed by Liz O’Donoghue for Munster Arts Centre in 2003 - reciting his poetry - likewise featuring Thomas McCarthy, Patrick Cotter, Conal Creedon, Trevor Joyce, Patrick Galvin, Theo Dorgan, Louis De Paor, John Montague, Roz Cowman, Robert O’Donoghue, Rosemary Canavan, Gerry Murphy, Gregory O’Donoghue, Aíne Miller and Liz O’Donoghue. Original music and soundtrack by Martin Moylett. Camera, sound and editing by Dave Whelan. Additional editing by Neil Patrick McCarthy. Copyright held by Liz O’Donoghue. (Aug. 2018).Available at YouTube - online; accessed 19.08.2024.)

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