The Ship of Birth

Despite his long residence in Vermont, Delanty remains an Irish poet at heart; his compact, entertaining seventh collection, much of it built around the birth of his son, Daniel, draws on some of the virtues and mannerisms of Delanty's compatriot Paul Muldoon. Effusive, distractable, given to wit and to sonic patterns just this side of ostentation, Delanty's stanzas celebrate conception, gestation and early childhood without taking themselves overseriously: an opening poem hails "Our sprout// who art there inside the spacecraft/ of your Ma." The delivery itself gives rise to a profusion of consonant wordplay, since the poet envisions it as "A Circus": "juggling doctors; funambulist nurses;/ and all the farraginous farrago of this Earth." Soon after Daniel is born, Delanty's mother dies; her diagnosis, chemotherapy and expected demise provide a counterpoint to the birth, and Delanty (The Blind Stitch ) treats her death with relative reserve. Rapid free verse that at times approximates couplets, stanzas packed with off-rhymes, and attractively constructed sonnets make clear his technical prowess, while quotable endings should bring a tremble of recognition to readers who know the scenes described; at the end of "The Fetal Monitor Day," the son in the womb has "gone quiet as a dormouse,/ about to bring down your own house." (Mar.)