The Ship of Birth: Poems

by Greg Delanty

Overview

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, reflections on the nature of the soul, thoughts on 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 future. Delanty acknowledges the dark and difficult reality that the child faces, while affirming the sustaining conti­nuity of life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807132197
Publisher:	Louisiana State University Press
Publication date:	03/01/2007
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	68
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.20(d)

About the Author

A native of Cork, Ireland, and now an American citizen, Greg Delanty is the author of seven full collections of poetry, including American Wake; The Hellbox; The Blind Stitch; and Collected Poems 1986–2006. He is a recipient of the Patrick Kavanagh Award and the Austin Clarke Centenary Poetry Award and is artist in residence of the English department at Saint Michael's College in Colchester, Vermont, where he has taught since 1987.

Table of Contents

The Alien     1
Paper Light     2
According to the Nepalese     3
Morning Watch     4
Sonogram     5
Sound Kinetics     6
Sightings     7
The Expected     8
The Air Display     9
The Great Ship     10
Apology to Crickets     11
A New Genre     12
The Sea Horse Family     13
The Wordmen     14
Hero's Return     15
The Shutterbug     16
The Soul Hunter     17
Snow and Wind Canticle to an Unborn Child     18
To the Blue People     19
The Fetal Monitor Day     20
The God of Dry Mouths     21
The Present     22
For the Record     23
The Third Trimester     24
The Turtle Mother     25
Black Snow     26
The Neo-Natal     27
The Coronation     28
The Ship of Birth     29
From Woody's Restaurant, Middlebury     31
The Arrival     32
A Circus     33
To My Mother     34
Late Entry     35
The Language of Crying     36
Posthalamion     37
The Green Room     38
Chemotherapy     39
The Road Hazard     40
Fontanelle     41
The Ink Moth     42
The Naming of Clouds     44
The Joker Family     45
The West     46
The Wave     47
Ties     48
Shopping for a Composter     49
The Birds     50
The Skunk Moths     51
The New Voyager     55

Editorial Reviews

Despite his long residence in Vermont, Delanty remains an Irish poet at heart; his compact, entertaining seventh collection, much of it built around the birth of his son, Daniel, draws on some of the virtues and mannerisms of Delanty's compatriot Paul Muldoon. Effusive, distractable, given to wit and to sonic patterns just this side of ostentation, Delanty's stanzas celebrate conception, gestation and early childhood without taking themselves overseriously: an opening poem hails "Our sprout// who art there inside the spacecraft/ of your Ma." The delivery itself gives rise to a profusion of consonant wordplay, since the poet envisions it as "A Circus": "juggling doctors; funambulist nurses;/ and all the farraginous farrago of this Earth." Soon after Daniel is born, Delanty's mother dies; her diagnosis, chemotherapy and expected demise provide a counterpoint to the birth, and Delanty (The Blind Stitch) treats her death with relative reserve. Rapid free verse that at times approximates couplets, stanzas packed with off-rhymes, and attractively constructed sonnets make clear his technical prowess, while quotable endings should bring a tremble of recognition to readers who know the scenes described; at the end of "The Fetal Monitor Day," the son in the womb has "gone quiet as a dormouse,/ about to bring down your own house." (Mar.)

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