Many of the poems in Southward, Greg Delanty's second collection, evoke the Ireland that was and is. In others the poet mourns the loss of a lover, the death of his father, the plight of an emigrant separated from those he is close to. The achievement of Southward promise a long and vibrant career for this award-winning young poet.

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, the nature of the soul, 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...

Irish poet Greg Delanty presents a series of poems that explore the birth of a child. These poems log the days before and after a child is born, detailing the wonder and trepidation of parents, the growth of the child, and speculation on the soul and spirit. Written from the vantage point of a father his hopes, fears, awe, and perplexity these poems register the seen and unseen interconnections of place, people, the natural world, and the continuity of the past with the present and the future.
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Greg Delanty grew up in a family of printers, and as a youth he worked in the composing room. A hellbox is the bin into which printers chucked broken or worn type, and the conceit that unites this collection is the technology, lore, and tradition of hot-metal printing. Here, the language of printing--literal and symbolic--inspires a series of moving and powerful poems.
Delanty writes with an impetuous daring that combines controlled rhetoric with a vernacular tang, especially in the long title-poem, which describes his immigration to the United States and his attempt to deal with feelings...

The Blind Stitch is a book which is sewn together with two main conceits. One is the leper conceit, which is the stitching of personal and public suffering and inescapable complicity; the other is the varied line of stitches, seen and unseen, that connect our private and public lives.

These poems are a chronicle of complicity in our modern lives, a witnessing of war and the destruction of our planet. It is also an attempt to adjust the more destructive blueprint myths of our society. Often our cultural memory tells us to keep quiet about the aspects that are most challenging to our ethics, to forget the violations we feel and tremors that keep us distant and numb. If we begin to face and speak and create from these human aftermaths, as these poems do, then we can change and become more comfortable with healthier ways of being alive.

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...