Book Seventeen

Book Seventeen - Cover

Poems

by Greg Delanty

94 pages / 6.00 x 9.00 inches / no illustrations

ebook available

Poetry

Paperback / 9780807159705 / February 2015
Purporting to be a “lost” seventeenth book of the 16-volume Anthologia Graeca, Book Seventeen uses the themes and images of ancient mythology to conjure a new way of looking at our modern world. Gods of all types line the pages of this collection, from those deities that only operate in our personal spaces—the poet’s companion, the demigod Solitude, as well as the elusive god of Complicity—to more familiar divinities in unfamiliar roles, such as Helios shopping in an outdoor market in Paris, or an aging Aphrodite in a short skirt chatting with visitors to an unfamiliar city.
 
Pithy and humorous, reverential and impudent, Greg Delanty’s poems showcase the author’s keen eye for the mythologies on which we depend to make sense of our messy, bewildering lives.

Greg Delanty was born in Cork City, Ireland, and maintains dual citizenship in Ireland and the United States, where he has lived since 1986. He is the author of No More Time and Book Seventeen, among many other poetry collections, and he has received numerous awards for his work, including a Guggenheim Fellowship. He teaches at Saint Michael’s College in Vermont.

Praise for Book Seventeen

“[These poems are] fresh visitations, remarkable in their metaphorical ingenuity. Delanty has found and fashioned sounds that genuinely recall the miscellaneousness of his exemplars, rich and thick with the physics of existence and poignant with emotional restraint, often quietly rhymed. . . . And Book Seventeen is fun to read, as Delanty hip-hops between epochs, at times echoing age-old tropes and settings and then leaping to up-to-date, altogether recognizable details.”—Seven Days

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