Compare Southward by Greg Delanty, Paperback | Indigo Chapters

In ?Home from Home,? Greg Delanty encapsulates an immigrant?s lament: ?I?m in a place, but it is not in me.? A native of Ireland who now spends much of his time in the United States, Delanty has assembled in Southward a collection of poems whose settings are predominantly Cork City and County Kerry, in the southernmost part of the Irish Republic, a region warmed by the Gulf Stream and by a people whose language is as vivid as the area?s abundant wild fuchsia. In ?The Fuchsia Blaze,? Delanty writes: The purple petticoated & crimson frocks of the open flowers are known as Dancers, blown by the fast & slow airs of the wind; one minute sean-nós melancholy, the next jigging & reeling like Irish character itself & like these, my fuchsia verse, struggling to escape the English garden & flourish in a wilder landscapeIn many of the poems Delanty evokes the Ireland that was and is, while in others he mourns the loss of a lover, the death of his father, separation from his mother. In ?The Emigrant?s Apology,? through a haunting image of a black-scarfed woman worshiping alone, he describes his mother, who, with the loss of her husband and the scattering of her family, is a symbol of the grief of separation from his mother. In ?The Emigrant?s Apology,? through a haunting image of a black-scarfed woman worshiping alone, he describes his mother, who, with the loss of her husband and the scattering of her family, is a symbol of the grief of separation. Always home in the natural world, even in his adopted landscape, Delanty closes the book with a handful of poems set in the United States. The imagery of these latter poems ranges from a quiet pond in southern Florida to a military base on the border of Canada, and their concerns range from the personal to the political. | Southward by Greg Delanty, Paperback | Indigo Chapters