On the Town: Cork poet Greg Delanty knew everyone in the room, except for one man, who he joked should get a prize for turning up. "We'll keep it short so we can go to the bar afterwards and talk. But I have to do it professionally," he said, apologising to his friends and family for delaying the party.
"Read away," said his brother, Dr Norman Delanty, of Beaumont Hospital, encouragingly.
Everyone who had gathered upstairs in the Teachers' Club for the reading - from Joe Woods, director of Poetry Ireland, to writer Anne Haverty - hoped fervently that Delanty would "read away" and share some of his poems. And he did.
Reading from his sixth book, The Ship of Birth, Delanty explained this was "a kind of diary to a child who is unborn and poems to a child after the birth".
'Alien', the first poem in this collection, describes his feelings on seeing his son's ultrasound: "Our sprout,/ who art there inside the spacecraft/ of your ma, the time capsule of this printout/ hurling and whirling towards us, it's all daft/ on this earth."
Today Delanty, who won the Patrick Kavanagh Award in 1983, will be reading in Paris in the Centre Culturel Irlandais. In 1999 he won the UK's National Poetry Competition, and has also won the Allan Dowling Poetry Fellowship and the Austin Clarke Centenary Poetry Award.
Based in Vermont in the US, Delanty's poems will feature in an independent movie, American Wake, which is being directed by Maureen Foley.
Among those who came to hear Delanty read from his latest book were poets Paddy Bushe from Waterville, Co Kerry; Anthony Cronin, and writer and publisher Dermot Bolger.
The Ship of Birth by Greg Delanty is published by Carcanet; paperback 11.50