Poetry review: Memorable poems about forgetting

Something darker hovers in the margins of every page in Greg Delanty's 'The Professor of Forgetting' 

Greg Delanty at the launch of 'The Professor of Forgetting', his new book of poems, at the Crawford Art Gallery, Cork.

• The Professor of Forgetting 
• Greg Delanty 
• LSU Press, €19.95

On first reading, Greg Delanty’s newest collection appears to be greatly concerned with time, memory, and the mutability of both.

The book’s first poem, ‘Going Nowhere’, approaches this dilemma with his trademark brew of comic tragedy: “…the mule of Now bolts free of the harness,/hightails it, leaves you on your ass”. Something else, though, something darker, hovers in the margins of every page.

At times in this collection, the poems seem to be rebelling against forgetting — if enough memories are set down, then maybe the griefs of time can be paused.

We see this most vividly in poems such as ‘The Dust Gatherers’, where he reminisces about his mother’s futile daily war against dust, in ‘Aceldama’, where he presents childhood memories of trips to the beach, or even in eulogies to the lost memories of unnamed others — “the memory of memory lost” – in poems such as ‘American Wake’ and ‘Elegy for Somebody with Alzheimer’s’.

This, in a way, is the Delanty we expect to see, but we also get some surprising and arresting insights into how Delanty sees himself, or how he wants us to see him, in ‘Consciousness’: 

“To my mind it’s more like a pinball machine...the minefield of coloured lights, flashing with words/like Jackpot, Tombstone, Road Trip, Home, Loser”.

Another such moment comes in ‘News Report of Collateral Damage’ when he speaks of his non-negotiable love for Yeats and Kavanagh, but slips in the line “Oh, my two poets whom I steer by, I know my station.” 

What’s he getting at here? That after five decades of poetic endeavour the mountain peak might not, after all, be attained? That he has, therefore, settled for his current “station”?

Whatever he truly means, it’s fair to say that few others write poems like this.

The strongest, and most unsettling, poem in the book is ‘Diagnoses’, where we get stark, unadorned lines such as “The word relapse is a phone/ringing in the middle of the night” and “You make ready again for hope/tiresome hope.” 

So this, then, is why we see Delanty clinging so fiercely to memory. Here is where he turns to face the dark beast that, in truth, stalks every page of this book.

Here is where he grabs your wrist and forces you to look too.

There are times in the collection when the text slackens into prose. Efforts such as ‘After Losing a Front Tooth’ or ‘Routine Cleaning’ seem incomplete, more like ideas for poems yet to be written.

The collection regains itself in the final poem, ‘The Professor of Forgetting’.

The first four lines of the poem are unnecessary — an overly defensive rebuttal to something said by a colleague at the university that employs him, something that the reader isn’t in on.

From here, though, we find the poet in wistful, reflective mode.

He’s more at peace with his status, with the changes in himself, and with the changing faces around him, than he is anywhere else in the collection.

He watches students head out into the world, an adventure he once embarked on: “I can barely manage to retrieve/this spring’s list before students head off/into their unknown lives, wishing them well/with something like love in my tone.” 

He thinks of his father in his childhood garden, being chastised by his mother for forgetting (that word again) to lodge his first week’s wages.

Finally, he seems to accept the necessity of loss, of forgetting and, perhaps, the necessary presence of that dark, unnamed other: “I’m forgetting that other country, that other world. I am/forgetting forgetting.” 

The tone of the book’s final lines is unapologetic, but gentle, as if Delanty is inviting us to sit and take our ease with him: “Now, where was I? Oh, my Darlings, Kids, Loves.”