Collected Poems

Each of Greg Delanty's six books so far published is an entity in itself, a single-seeming movement. Bringing the books together in a single volume, juxtaposing them as it were, reveals the enormous resourcefulness and wit of this unusual poet who keenly interweaves material and themes drawn from his reading, writing and living (there is no real line between them). Marriage, childbirth, friendship, landscapes Irish and Indian and American, real and imagined, politics, the personal and private and the public... we are organised as a word and a line and a stanza are made from a tray of type, as in a tapestry the unseen sewing happens and holds, as in growth a foetus evolves into a child. Things fall apart, too, and there is pattern and method in that process as well. The poems draw on a rich inheritance from the different worlds that Delanty moves in: Ireland and America, Gaelic and English, traditional verse forms and modern colloquial.