Greg Delanty Reading From His New Book, ‘Selected Delanty’

Greg Delanty was born in Cork City, Ireland, in 1958 and lived in Cork until 1986. He became a US citizen in 1992, and retains his Irish citizenship. He now lives most of the year in Burlington, Vermont, where he is the Poet in Residence at St. Michael’s College. He returns to his Irish home in Derrynane, County Kerry, each summer. Delanty has either written or edited seventeen books and has received numerous awards for his poetry including The Patrick Kavanagh Award (1983), The Allan Dowling Poetry Fellowship (1986), the Austin Clarke Centenary Poetry Award (1997), and a Guggenheim Fellowship for poetry (2008). He has received an Irish Arts Council Bursary, and has been widely anthologized.

Greg Delanty’s papers up to 2010 are housed in The National Library of Ireland. His papers from 2010 to 2015 are housed in the Boole Library of University College Cork.

He is Past President of The Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW).

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 nest 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

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