Selected Delanty

"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 finest 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. Following upon his Guggenheim Fellowship, Agenda devoted its Summer/Autumn issue in 2008 to the celebration of Greg Delanty's 50th birthday. In a sense it was a twain celebration, language being re-made and voice re-born by Atlantic Crossings. Ulster people are British and Irish people are Irish, and never the twain shall meet. An adaptation of Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.-- Rudyard Kipling, 'Barrack-Room Ballads' (1892). But what, when the twain meet, of Greg Delanty and North America. Un-Gyve Press is pleased to publish this first Selected Delanty.