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Best of Irish Poetry 2010
Editor: Matthew Sweeney

Songs of Earth and Light
Barbara Korun poems translated by Theo Dorgan

Done Dating DJs
by Jennifer Minniti-Shippey
Winner, 2008 Fool for Poetry Competition

Richesses: Francophone Songwriter Poets
Edited and translated by Aidan Hayes

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GREG DELANTY

Greg Delanty was born in Cork City, Ireland in 1958 and lived in Cork until 1986. Since then he lives most of the year in Vermont where he teaches at St. Michael’s College. He has been politically active and ran for the Vermont Green Party in the US elections.  For three months of each year he returns to his Irish home in Derrynane, County Kerry. He has received numerous awards for his poetry including The Patrick Kavanagh Award (1983), The Allan Dowling Poetry Fellowship (1986), and the Austin Clarke Centenary Poetry Award (1997). In 1999 he was a prizewinner in the National Poetry Competition. He has received an Irish Art Council Bursary, and has been widely anthologised. He has also recently received Guggenheim for poetry. The magazine Agenda has just devoted a recent issue to celebrate Greg Delanty’s 50th birthday.

Disarming

A middle-aged woman – plain you might say – cycles by

our house. I was out of sorts, not long up,

but her serene smile brought me to my senses,

without saying a word said: ‘Take in the sun on the lake,

the honeysuckle’s pink fingers bursting into yellow flames of scent,

          the traffic for once on North Avenue gone so quiet

you can hear the whirr of the ruby-throated hummingbird’s wings

          reversing in midair.’ On another morning such serenity

 would have vexed me, but there is something so natural

          about her demeanor. She doesn’t notice me.

Disarmed, I let what bothers me go

and think since there’s no corresponding god

– the pantheon being all tiresome piss and vinegar –

          we must create a new order and call her    

Tranquilia, Calmes, or promote Halcyon and tell Aphrodite,

          Ares, Artemis, even Zeus, to move over in the pecking order,                  

set her smack in the middle, the woman

who cycled by our house this divine morning.

©2009 Greg Delanty

Author Links

Delanty bio and reviews at Carcanet

Delanty poems 'The Alien' and 'The Ship of Birth' at Artvt

Two Seán Ó Ríordáin poems translated by Delanty at Poetry Daily

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