Michael Coffey, Publishers Weekly Daily, April 24, 2006:

Three Answers: Greg Delanty

Greg Delanty, a 47-year-old poet from Cork City, Ireland, now living in Burlington, Vt., has just returned from a formal book launch of his Collected Poems 1986-2006 from Carcanet Press in Dublin, where Oxford poetry chair Christopher Ricks introduced Delanty and his work in a 15-minute address. In the U.S., Delanty's latest poetry volume The Blind Stitch is published by Louisiana State University Press. His next volume, The Ship of Birth, is due from LSU in Spring 2007.

PW: You are fairly young to have a Collected Poems. How did it come about that you felt it was time to encapsulate all your work?

GD: I gave Michael Schmidt at Carcanet Press a selected poems, but he wanted my collected. I'm happy about this since the poems in my last three published collections The Hellbox, The Blind Stitch and The Ship of Birth are set in their own interrelating and metaphorical worlds. The Hellbox is set in the typesetting world of my father and the male world; The Blind Stitch in the sewing world of my mother, wife and the female; and The Ship of Birth in the world of the child. They are a kind of trilogy: male, female, child. Though I didn't set out to do this--it just happened. The Collected Poems allows these books to stay together and relate from poem to poem and from book to book.

PW: You are from Cork, Ireland, but have lived in the U.S. for 20 years. How do you see yourself in the Irish poetic tradition? In the American?

GD: I've lived here for most of my writing life, and have been an American citizen for more than 10 years. I even ran for the Green Party in the elections. I see myself as both part of the Irish poetic tradition and part of the American tradition. I'm recasting myself from the hellbox of America, and picking from the spirit fonts of the Irish and U.S. traditions where I feel and think they suit, sometimes mixing the fonts, and sometimes dipping into the font trays of other traditions.

PW: You have written a lot about different locales--India, France, Sri Lanka, as well as Ireland and New England. Do different locales make for different poems beyond subject matter?

GD: My American-based poems tend to have a looser, more open structure when appropriate--the looseness of the New York School or the Beats is evident, for instance, in the title poem of The Hellbox. The vastness, richness and variety of subcontinents like the U.S. and India cannot generally be contained within strict traditional forms. I'm also aware of the great traditional poems of Robert Frost and his New England--a smaller more homogeneous zone in the U.S.

I do use traditional forms such as the sonnet, which in my work implies complicity in our lives. This form was brought into the English language by Edmund Spenser and Walter Raleigh, both of whom lived in Cork, great English poets who committed murderous acts in that land. A recent sonnet, 'Loosestrife', metaphorically represents the U.S. and the West--loosestrife was brought here from Europe. I'm extending that poetic landscape into America, over space, sea and time.