Greg Delanty: I have lived in the US for over half my life but never lost my Cork accent

Having spent over half of his life living in the US, the question of identity weighs heavily on Cork poet Greg Delanty

Adi Roche Greg Delanty at the launch of The Professor of Forgetting, a new book of poems by Greg Delanty at the Crawford Art Gallery, Cork.

Folks often ask me here in the US, when they hear my accent, where I’m from. By “often” I mean at least a few times a week since settling here in 1986. I am called Irish, both by myself and everyone else.

I am just about to turn 65, which means I have lived in the US for over half my life. I often joke about which half of me is Irish and which is American. Slice me down the middle, from my brain to my gluteus maximus and say the slightly bigger side is the US Greg.