Mysterious Crafts: The Figure of Printing in the Poems of Greg Delanty

Abstract

For critic Sven Birkerts?author of The Gutenberg Elegies (1994)?the print ed word stands on verge of extinction, a casualty of electronic media and information technology. But for Irish poet Greg Delanty (b. 1958), who grew up in Cork in a family of printers, metal and ink of hot-metal print ing exert a continuing fascination and offer a fertile ground for metaphor. In The Hellbox (1998), Delanty's recent collection of poems, figure of printing becomes at once a conduit for memory, a vehicle for exploration of immi grant identity, and an emblem for poet's social role. Recalling the old names for printing; / The Mysterious Craft or simply The Mystery Delanty reclaims for craft an inherent dignity and an inveigling strangeness.1 The Hellbox is Delanty's fourth collection of poems. In theme and tone it extends enterprise o? American Wake (1995), his previous collection, but it also represents greater maturity of style and perspective. About a third of eighteen poems in The Hellbox reflect, fondly but realistically, on print shop where Delanty's father was foreman and poet was a lowly apprentice. Other poems explore Delanty's American experience, including his visit to a ghost town in New Hampshire, a stroll under cathedral arches / of Brooklyn Bridge that's strung like a harp, (HB 33) and a meandering trip through Ver mont with a fellow poet, a parody... of Brendan or Odysseus and their muti nous crews (HB 28). In tones ranging from buoyant to sad to bitter, Delanty addresses a spectrum of personal themes, most prominently loss of his father, humiliation in childhood, rejection in adulthood, emigrant identity, and?not least?the estate of poetry, contending at one point, that awesome poetry should be dumped (HB 42). Although Delanty gravitates toward sonnet, The Hellbox also contains poems in open, American-influenced form, among them title poem, which throws off fetters of meter, adopts a feck less tone, and rambles on for ten pages, exulting in its own asymmetries and imperfections. Common to many of poems is a fusion of conventional form with a vernacular diction which can embrace words as earthy as jawing, shagging, and shebang. And common to nearly all is conceit of printing,