The Ship of Birth records a father’s responses in the days immediately before and after a child is born. Just as material significant to the dead is placed in a Ship of Death, so this Ship of Birth contains what is significant to the child: the parents’ wonder and trepidation, the nature of the soul, the child’s future growth. The poems draw on a rich inheritance from the worlds that Delanty moves among: Ireland and America, Gaelic and English, traditional verse forms and modern colloquial, to evoke the subtle interconnections of past, and future, people and places. Greg Delanty acknowledges the dark and difficult world that the child is entering, while affirming the sustaining continuity of life.