Peter Costello
Poet Greg Delanty refreshes his Irish roots No More Time
by Greg Delanty (Louisiana State University Press, $17.95/£16.50/€19.99; order from www.eurospangroup.com)
“Merritt Island, Florida, was flooded in order to eradicate mosquitoes around the Kennedy Space Centre, destroying this sparrow’s only nesting ground.”
The sparrow in question is the Dusky seaside sparrow. But this observation which introduces one of Greg Delanty’s poems sums it all up: as ‘mankind’ stands on the brink of conquering cosmic space, down here the effort to do so extinguished a small rare, indeed unique bird.
Still, as we are told elsewhere, no sparrow falls to earth without being noticed. In this new volume of poems Mr Delanty assembles a call over of what has been lost or soon to go. It used to be save the whale, or love a dolphin. But in fact, it is far lowlier creatures around which the future revolves, or more likely no longer revolves because they are gone.
Greg Delanty is a Cork-born poet, who has taught in Vermont since the mid-1980s in between going on protest, always wearing a tie – try it he says, and see the effect on the police. Today he is poet in residence at St Michael’s College, a small foundation of the Edmundite Fathers.
This is his most recent poetry collection and it is a memorable one. It is entirely devoted to disappearing creatures. Parts one and two ‘A Field Guide to People’ consist of a sequences of sonnets. In contrast to the strict formality of these, a different sequence, ‘Breaking News’ separating them, shows his versatility in a series of free form poems, which explore other aspects of the crisis we face. It is a book all poetry lovers should read, and everyone else know about. He is, in a way, a nature poet in the continuing tradition of the Irish monks of Early Christian Ireland.
Moved
I was deeply moved by all the pieces, which built together as one poet’s response to what he sees, comes to know, and fears to think about.
Back in 2014, he thought it was a matter of “so little time”. Now there is “no more time”. How many warnings do we want? I have been haunted of late days by a passage in Jeremiah 2:16: “And I brought you into the land of Carmel, to eat the fruit thereof, and the best things thereof: and when ye entered in, you defiled my land, and made my inheritance an abomination”.
An afterthought: teachers of all kinds should note this book would make an ideal book for school or college projects, combining as it does knowledge about what is endangered and what needs to be done to save each of these individual creatures. And also supports poetry by getting young people to read it.