Southward: Poems (Paperback)

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-n's melancholy, the next jigging & reeling like Irish character itself & like these, my fuchsia verse, struggling to escape the English garden & flourish in a wilder landscape In 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