By working with veterans, survivors, citizens and artists, we turn complex and often violent experiences into a collective memory and cultural response to the things that we have had to bear witness to. Beginning to reconcile and embrace how conflicts have shaped our lives and where our responsibilities lie is a mountainous task enabled by the collaboration of many people. Often our cultural memory of war tells us to keep quiet about the aspects that are most challenging to our ethics, to forget the violations we feel and tremors that keep us distant and numb. If we begin to face and speak and create from these human aftermaths, we begin to learn that we are not alone ...rather closer to coming home than we ever thought.
—from the forward, The New Citizen Army
Reviews:
“The Word in Flames” - a review by Dave Lourdan in Southword: New Writing from Ireland
“Locating the Muse” - Fiona Sampson at IrishTimes.com
About the Author
Greg Delanty was born in Cork City, Ireland, in 1958 and lived in Cork until 1986. For three months of each year he returns to his Irish home in Derrynane, County Kerry. Greg Delanty’s most recent books are The New Citizen Army, The Ship of Birth (Louisiana State University Press 2006), The Blind Stitch (LSU Press, 2003) and The Hellbox (Oxford University Press 1998). His Collected Poems 1986-2006 is out from the Oxford Poet’s series of Carcanet Press. He edited, with the scholar Michael Matto, The Word Exchange, Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation, WW Norton, November, 2010. He has received many awards, most recently a Guggenheim for poetry. The magazine Agenda has just devoted its latest issue to celebrate Greg Delanty’s 50th birthday. The National Library of Ireland has recently acquired his papers up to the end of 2012. He is the current President of the Association of Literary scholars, Critics and Writers. He is a US citizen and an Irish Citizen and teaches at Saint Michael’s College, Vermont. He has lived in Vermont since 1986.
