Irish Literary Luminaries Poet Greg Delanty in Conversation with Irish Author Colum McCann

Last night at the Irish Arts Center, Greg Delanty (b Ireland 1958) delighted the audience with his poetry & pondering as prodded by author Colum McCann (b Ireland 1965).  The evening was introduced as a comfortable fireside chat with internationally celebrated poet Greg Delanty (Patrick Kavanagh Award) and National Book Award winning writer Colum McCann.  The evening was a delightful and intimate experience.  McCann set a comfortable rapport with his friend and the audience.  He explained there wasn't going to be a formal structure of reciting & then analyzing poetry.  The camaraderie and mutual imbibing was inviting.  Delanty, in a very thick Irish brogue  was appealing but not always decipherable said ,"I know that most of you probably came out because this guy {Colum McCann} is here and don't have any idea who I am."  This brought laughter and in my case, this was true.   It's also true this was an especially enchanting evening.  Delanty read poems from his newest collection "Selected Delanty" chosen by McCann in random order.  Delanty spoke haltingly (with personal interjections) and divinely.  He was even gleeful and proud when McCann chose 2 poems that he loved.  An "American Wake" was a poem Delanty said he didn't care for "...the memory of memory lost, breaking the heart's of ghosts."  There was much to admire and revel in the readings.  McCann might tell Delanty how he entered & responded to a poem after its reading.  "An American Wake" McCann described it like a prayer.   McCann recited other lines he was smitten with "playing the harp backwards".  Delanty said it was the image he sees in the Brooklyn Bridge and refers to not looking back in regret at leaving Ireland. "Open sesame country" was also a fragment of the poem an allegory for the Statue of Liberty & our nation.  The two spoke about the wakes given to the 'livin in Ireland knowing the person was leaving for good. It's a joyous celebration with the person present along with plenty of good cheer & whiskey.   As the two talked and drank with each othe the audience became an invisible participant in their bantering and rantings.  Delanty was harsh on fellow Irishmen Frank McCourt's writings he felt characterized Ireland as a country of pathetic indigent people.  McCann took issue with this (although that was my sense from "Angela's Ashes").   When asked how Delanty comes to his poems, he was pensive before responding. "Poems come from the back of me all the people who come before us, an awareness of our fragility and a desire to be part of all the people who will follow." Q&A was held outside the theater bar side.  Delanty's poems possess an agility and depth, pathos with layers of the comic & tragic.