Among the Irish poets who have come to UNF since John Montague first visited here in 1991, several who now make their homes in the United States have memorably recorded and interpreted their experience of the Irish Diaspora. Eamon Grennan (2002) and Paul Muldoon (2005) come readily to mind and, especially, Eamonn Wall (1999 and 2005). But the poet laureate of the contemporary Irish-in-America may well be Greg Delanty. So says Irish novelist Colum McCann, who has himself resettled in America: “Delanty has catalogued an entire generation and its relationship to exile. He is the laureate of those who have gone.” Greg Delanty will present a Valentine’s Day reading from his poems in the University Gallery (Building Two) at 7:30 p.m., followed by a reception and book-signing.

Delanty was born (1958) and raised in Cork City and earned a B.A. at University College Cork, where he studied with John Montague (UNF 1991, 1993, 1996). Since 1987 he has taught at St. Michael’s College in Vermont; in 1994 he became a U.S. citizen (while retaining his Irish passport and his Cork accent). Since 1986 he has published seven volumes of poems as well as translations, anthologies and chapbooks. His poems have appeared in American, Argentinian, Australian, English, Irish and Japanese anthologies.

The displaced feelings of an emigrant inform poems in Delanty’s second collection, Southward (1992), including the slightly sprung sonnet, “The Emigrant’s Apology,” and “Home from Home,” which begins, “Perhaps now I understand the meaning of home / for I’m in a place, but it is not in me . . .” Maybe half the poems in Delanty’s third collection, American Wake (1995), reflect stages in the process by which, in time, and after some resistance, the (new) place he was in increasingly was in him. In “The Yank,” Delanty asks, still resisting, “How were any of us wiseguy kids to know / when we mocked busloads of rotund Yanks / bleating WOW along every hedgerow / from Malin Head down to the Lee banks, . . . / that I’d one day come back, / a returned Yank myself, and you’d mock me / when I let slip restroom or gas station.” “Vermont Aisling” shows him beginning to come to terms with his new environment, at least in one season. “Vermont [he says, speaking to himself] was like a wooer / whose attraction / you shut out, preoccupied / with a lifelong crush [on Ireland]. / But lately [he continues], / you’ve been taken / with this place, / especially since / snow covers / any resemblance / to that other one / and its perpetual row, / stilled beneath / the snow’s silence. / May it snow for ever / and for ever now.”

Delanty’s next four collections, while not ignoring the theme of emigration, have not made it their main focus and have embraced new themes. Many poems in The Hellbox (1998) take their inspiration from the print shop in Cork where his father had been foreman of the compositors; where Greg as a child had walked, wide-eyed, among the men working there; and where at 13 or 14 he had held his first summer job. In the imagery of the print shop – while not focusing on emigration – Delanty discovered en passant a metaphor apt for the emigrant experience. During a 1999 interview he said, “In The Hellbox there is the theme of broken, worn, damaged, obsolete type. When the type is broken, worn or damaged it’s cast into a box called the hellbox. The type was then melted down and recast. I saw this also as a metaphor for immigrants who have to go through a kind of recasting.”

If The Hellbox is grounded in the life and work of his father, a majority of the poems in his next two volumes, The Blind Stitch (2001) and The Ship of Birth (2003), as well as the new poems which conclude his Collected Poems 1986-2006 (2006), relate to women, especially his mother and his wife. He records and reflects upon the stages of his wife’s pregnancy, and then the birth and infancy of their son Dan, in tandem with recording and reflecting upon the stages of his mother’s final illness and death. With tact, understatement and infinite subtlety, Delanty negotiates between and ultimately reconciles these two elemental experiences, ironically juxtaposed: the coming of life, the coming of death.

For all the grave beauty of Delanty’s poems which treat most serious subjects, the body of his work is equally characterized by playfulness, exuberant high spirits and irreverent wit. Thus, “A Circus” turns a hospital’s bustling birthing room into a riotous “Greatest Show of Earth,” in which he is “the huffing and puffing red-faced Bozo father” and new arrival is “the Cannonball Kid himself / shot from the dilatory, dilative distaff / of your ma,” only to land safely “in the hand-net of nurse and doctor; / the whole show agape in the pause before applause.” The breadth and range of Delanty’s poems–their varied subjects, their moods and feelings, their many modes and voices–make his work endlessly interesting, the reading of it–or the listening to it–a series of happy surprises. Come hear for yourself on February 14.

Greg Delanty has received many honors, most recently being named the winner of a coveted Guggenheim Fellowship (2007). Other major awards include the Patrick Kavanagh Award (1983), the Allen Dowling Poetry Fellowship (1986), the Wolfers-O’Neill Award (1996-97), the Austin Clarke Award (1996), an Arts Council of Ireland Bursary (1998-99), a National Poetry Competition Prize (Poetry Society of England, 1999) and an award from the Royal Literary Fund (1999).