"Michael Dylan Welch once quipped that, 'if haiku is a finger pointing at the moon, senryu is a finger poking you-or someone else-in the ribs.' In his wonderful new collection of senryu and longer poems, Robert Deluty manages to capture both the humor and pathos of these always fraught relationships - parent/child, teacher/student, doctor/patient - as in this senryu:
Rose Cohen
asking/ her forty-year-old gay son/ if it's a phase
. In each of his poems, Deluty delivers what R. H. Blyth called, 'moments of vision into, not the nature of things, but the nature of man...as in a flash of lightning.'"
-
Ronald W. Pies
, M.D., author of
The Unmoved Mover
and
The Levtov Trilogy
.
"Robert Deluty's poetry shows why parents, teachers, and doctors need to be careful, observant, and vigilant about how they process the world. For they give and receive in ways that should help children, students, and patients to grow - to make their lives better for themselves and for us all. With poignancy, humor, and wisdom, Deluty draws out our innermost feelings and thoughts so that we may become truer to ourselves and others."
Joseph L. DeVitis
, Ph.D., editor of
The Future of American Higher Education: How Today's Public Intellectuals Frame the Debate
"Robert Deluty's new book serves up in abundance the keenly observant humor we have come to expect, springing from the inherent comedy of the human condition and viewed invariably through the lens of his tender compassion. Likewise, he empathizes with the vulnerability and grief we encounter in others and ourselves. We are fully human, after all, only in our mixed-up connections with each other. Like the six-year-old in one of Deluty's senryu, who fills in the boxes of a crossword puzzle with tiny hearts, this book inserts love at every opportunity."
George H. Northrup
, Ph.D., author of
Wave into Wave, Light into Light: Poems and Places