Poet returns home to Cork from US to launch new book

POET Greg Delanty’s latest collection, The Professor of Forgetting, was launched by Chernobyl campaigner Adi Roche at the Crawford recently.

They are good friends. Greg got to know her through CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) in Cork in the 1970s “when we were trying to save the world”.

Greg is still doing his bit to try and make the world a better place, with his focus on climate change. It feeds into his poetry. He says that he is an obsessive type of person “which sometimes gets me into trouble”.

The Turners Cross-reared poet, who spends most of his time in the U.S where he is a professor in the English department at St Michael’s College, Vermont, is a dedicated environmentalist. He ran for election in Vermont on a green ticket during the time of President George W Bush. While he never intended to become a politician, he wanted to raise awareness of the green party and, to his surprise, he got 18,000 votes.

Visiting Ireland to do a series of launches of his book, Greg is planning to spend time at his holiday home in Derrynane in Kerry. The day after the Cork launch, we meet in a city hotel. Asked how he got into poetry, he says he knew before his Leaving Certificate that he wanted to be a poet.

“I just had an interest in words. It may have started with Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited. I had never heard of him but when I put on that record, I was hooked.”

When the 16-year-old Greg got wind that there was a real live poet living in Cork, he knocked on the door of the late John Montague when he lived on Grattan Hill.

I was trying to write poems and I thought they were better than Shakespeare! John was actually very kind to me. He read the poems and poured me a whiskey.

Looking back, Greg says his poems “were just dreadful. But John saw maybe not talent, but drive more than anything else.”

Later, Greg went to UCC where Montague was one of his lecturers. But Greg’s mother didn’t approve of her son’s pursuit of poetry. Having grown up in poverty on Blarney Street and Gurranabraher, “she wanted me to be money-secure. She was worried for me. She would have liked me to be in a white collar office job and to have respectability.”

Greg says that he had to hide his books under his bed because his mother thought they were dust collectors.

“I loved her but she was difficult. Some women were fine with being a housewife. It didn’t suit my mother. She never had a chance to blossom. She left school at 14.”

She lived to see her literary son’s success and was very proud of him.

“But she used to say the poets were mad. She was right of course!”

Unlike WB Yeats, who said that to be a poet, you have to put poetry before everything, Greg says that for him, poetry and his life are not separate. They feed into each other.

When I get absorbed in something, I write about it. Whatever obsesses me, I take action and also write.

Greg was arrested some time ago while protesting outside the White House in Washington against the fossil fuel industry. On the state of the environment, he says: “It’s a matter of how bad it’s going to be, but it can still be changed and we can be spared a certain amount.

“It’s also connected with population growth. The Catholic Church should cop on about condoms. It’s still the largest organisation in the world. There are too many people on the planet.

“I think the natural world is correcting that even now as we go along.

“It’s reacting against the treatment it has been getting, partly because of Christianity which is human-centred and believes we’re superior and not connected. We try to control everything for our own purposes. That’s madness.”

Greg walks the talk. He doesn’t use gas or oil in his two homes, having had solar panels installed for his energy needs. He cycles everywhere, even in Vermont in the winter. If it’s snowing, he puts his bike onto the front of the bus.

In April, 2022, Greg was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He has since had his prostate gland removed and is doing well. He has a book coming at a later stage called The Cancer Club.

Asked if becoming ill made him face his mortality, Greg says: “We’re always aware of it, aren’t we?”

Always looking for “a base to work out of, cancer gave me a real platform. A robot called da Vinci worked on the operation to remove the prostate. I got some good poems out of that.”

It’s all grist to the mill for this down-to-earth poet.