Greg Delanty - Böcker

Encompassing a wide range of voices-from weary sailors to forlorn wives, from heroic saints to drunken louts, from farmers hoping to improve their fields to sermonizers looking to save your soul—the 123 poems collected in The Word Exchange complement the portrait of medieval England that emerges from Beowulf, the most famous Anglo-Saxon poem of all. Offered here are tales of battle, travel, and adventure, but also songs of heartache and longing, pearls of lusty innuendo and clear-eyed stoicism, charms and spells for everyday use, and seven "hoards" of delightfully puzzling riddles.Featuring all-new translations by seventy-four of our most celebrated poets—including Seamus Heaney, Robert Pinsky, Billy Collins, Eavan Boland, Paul Muldoon, Robert Hass, Gary Soto, Jane Hirshfield, David Ferry, Molly Peacock, Yusef Komunyakaa, Richard Wilbur, and many others—The Word Exchange is a landmark work of translation, as fascinating and multivocal as the original literature it translates.

Featuring 123 all-new translations by seventy-four of our most celebrated poets—including Seamus Heaney, Robert Pinsky, Billy Collins, Eavan Boland, Richard Wilbur, and many others—“this brilliant anthology infuses new vigor into Old English poetry” (Library Journal). Presented in an authoritative bilingual edition, The Word Exchange is as fascinating and multivocal as the original literature it translates.

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.

Purporting to be a ""lost"" seventeenth book of the 16-volume Anthologia Graeca, Book Seventeen uses the themes and images of ancient mythology to conjure a new way of looking at our modern world. Gods of all types line the pages of this collection, from those deities that only operate in our personal spaces-the poet's companion, the demigod Solitude, as well as the elusive god of Complicity-to more familiar divinities in unfamiliar roles, such as Helios shopping in an outdoor market in Paris, or an aging Aphrodite in a short skirt chatting with visitors to an unfamiliar city. Pithy and humorous, reverential and impudent, Greg Delanty's poems showcase the author's keen eye for the mythologies on which we depend to make sense of our messy, bewildering lives.

In No More Time, Greg Delanty offers a celebration of the natural environment that also bemoans its mistreatment at the hands of humans. The collection's long sequence, "A Field Guide to People," is an alpha-bestiary of twenty-six sonnets, each a meditation on a species of flora or fauna that is thriving, endangered, or extinct. Evoking an earthly heaven, purgatory, and hell for plants and animals, these poems function also as love letters to the biosphere as they connect the past with the present in both form and content. In the middle of this sonnet sequence, a section labeled "Breaking News" gives voice in poetry to the political state of our planet with a balance of pathos, wit, and hope. Delanty stresses the deep underlying connections within and between the natural world and humankind, rather than the fragmented world stressed at the beginning of the twentieth century. No More Time witnesses the effects of climate change and presents a vital view of what remains at stake for engaged global citizens in the twenty-first century.

The Professor of Forgetting, a new collection from the acclaimed Irish poet Greg Delanty, swings back and forth on the fulcrum of what we call "now" and confronts our notion of how time passes. From the very first poem, "Going Nowhere Fast," which ponders whether we are now here or going nowhere, to the final selection, from which the book takes its self-reflective title, these exuberant poems chronicle what it means to be human with joy, pathos, honesty, despair, sorrow, celebration, and wit. Structurally diverse in form, the poems also explore a range of poignant topics, including childhood, family, love, racism, the natural world, immigration, and the unavoidability of death. Often humorous, Delanty's poetry finds ways of coping with the challenges of life, as it makes lasting art out of heartbreaking difficulty and experience.

Sweeney Now, a new book from the celebrated Irish poet Greg Delanty, is based on the twelfth-century texts of the middle Irish poem Buile Shuibhne (The Frenzy of Sweeney), a sequence in both verse and prose, which Delanty uses as a blueprint, a mythic foundation to tell and review what it is like to be a deracinated person and poet today, spending much of his time away from his native Ireland in the U.S. In the original, Sweeney, the archetypal poet of Irish myth, is driven mad as a consequence of a curse imposed on him. He sprouts wings and takes flight, exiles himself to the wilderness, where he spends many years alone, naked or sparsely clothed, ostracized by the outside world, living in trees, bemoaning his fate, celebrating nature, intermittently recovering his sanity, conversing with a fellow madman, and grieving this kindred spirit in moving elegies on the latter's death. Sweeney is also portrayed as somewhat of an amateur seer and converses with various visitors to whom he relates his plight and thoughts. Throughout the story he thinks of himself as a bird. Delanty's Sweeney riffs on these situations and predicaments in settings drawn from the modern literary and political world. The Sweeney of these often humorous poems should not be literally mistaken for Delanty himself—not entirely, that is. The poems are more like carnival mirrors, with the concomitant exaggerations, distortions, and partial truths of most any reflective autobiography.