Poetry: With the Collected Poems, Greg Delanty's steady readers in Ireland can now see him clearly as a naturalised American poet, like Eamon Grennan or Eamonn Wall.
One of the 1980s Irish to land in Manhattan, Delanty has appeared in leading American journals from the Atlantic Monthly to the Southern Review. Delanty's third collection, American Wake, registers the regrets of those Sin É Café emigrés, beginning with ekphrastic lines remembering MacDonald's painting, The Bowling Match at Castlemary, Cloyne, 1847. Like that of this painter's art, the motive of emigration is "to be relieved/ from whatever lurks in our background,/ just as the picture's crowd is freed / of famine & exile darkening the land . . ." Posing the same painting on its wrap, Collected Poems poses similar motives in its generous selections from Delanty's six books so far, thus making plain the distinctive contours of his poetry since Southward (1992).
One fine feature here is the casual sonnet. The "fourteen-liner" appears emphatically in American Wake and in The Ship of Birth (2003), the largest suite of poems in the Collected. There, in The Sea Horse Family, Delanty complicates his sonnet by letting an awkward echo of dialect create empathy: "but my mate,/ no stranger than who you are to yourself,/ feeling large as a whale and small as a human". Taking the freedom to do that - and without worrying about vamping idiom - is only one facet of Delanty's Stateside naturalisation. In The Splinters, Delanty apostrophises Irish poets from Amergin to Kavanagh, summing his purpose in an epigraph: "taking this familiar ink stance."
That phrase anticipates Delanty's breakthrough in the tribe of tropes that articulate the wit of The Hell Box (1998), where Delanty discovers the jargon of job printing in the Eagle works of Cork. At the end of an almost Beat riff, also titled The Hell Box, Delanty levels with his readers: "All I want is not simply to parrot American voices . . ."
Delanty avoids the temptation to "parrot" his adopted tradition because he relies on the Irish elegy - rather, on two inventively accomplished strains of that genre. Beginning early, with The Master Printer, Delanty extends that elegiac strain for his artisan father throughout the backdrop of The Hell Box, as in The Cure: " . . . coughing your smoker's cough,/ I thought that you had turned into me/ or I into you. I laughed your laugh . . . " Aceldama, the last suite in Collected Poems, unspools the thread of elegy for the poet's mother begun in The Blind Stitch (2001). That collection's finely modulated closing sonnet, The Blind Stitch answers those mortal strains: "But as we sew, love is/ in the mending, and though nothing's said, we feel it/ in a lightness of mood, our ease, our blind stitch". From there Delanty launches into the well-earned, familial celebrations of The Ship of Birth. While many American poets rely over much on tone, voice, and personality alone, Delanty's habit is to trust the affects of metaphor to reward the reader, no matter what reassuring form or lively idiom he has chosen.
Starting in the thick of Dublin's bohemia in the 1960s by writing the obverse of Anglo-Irishry, Leland Bardwell belongs to Michael Hartnett's generation of Irish poets. The Noise of Masonry Settling adds another decade of poems to those in Bardwell's The White Beach (1998) and confirms dimensions of her sensibility - one-shaped and irritated by Ireland in the easy and the difficult decades. Eschewing both received forms and overt metaphor, Bardwell returns here to poems of Brechtian bite, as in Office Vignette; of editorial impulse, as in Prison Poem IV; and of more durable, stripped-down mystery, as in Song or Black in Achill.
Indeed, Bardwell resists sentimental inceptions in even the gentler of these poems, as in The Violets of the Poor. Because Bardwell's allusions and imagery insistently site her poems in discomfiting Irish realities, the more confessional of her poems properly end and begin in the mode of Blake: "I'll do the messages,/ Give me the poison drops/ From the orphan's tongue./ I'll pre-digest the wrong." Recalling the startling outsider verse of Bardwell's contemporary, Patrick Galvin, such lines remind us that Bardwell remains an outsider at home in Yeats's Sligo - unnaturalised in EU Ireland.
Collected Poems 1986-2006 By Greg Delanty, Carcanet Press, 252pp. £14.95
The Noise of Masonry Settling By Leland Bardwell, Dedalus Press, 66pp. €11
Thomas Dillon Redshaw edits New Hibernia Review from the University of St Thomas in St Paul, Minnesota. He recently published a critical history of James Liddy's Arena in The South Carolina