No More Time

Book excerpt: In No More Time, Greg Delanty offers a celebration of the natural environment that also bemoans its mistreatment at the hands of humans. The collection’s long sequence, “A Field Guide to People,” is an alpha-bestiary of twenty-six sonnets, each a meditation on a species of flora or fauna that is thriving, endangered, or extinct. Evoking an earthly heaven, purgatory, and hell for plants and animals, these poems function also as love letters to the biosphere as they connect the past with the present in both form and content. In the middle of this sonnet sequence, a section labeled “Breaking News” gives voice in poetry to the political state of our planet with a balance of pathos, wit, and hope. Delanty stresses the deep underlying connections within and between the natural world and humankind, rather than the fragmented world stressed at the beginning of the twentieth century. No More Time witnesses the effects of climate change and presents a vital view of what remains at stake for engaged global citizens in the twenty-first century.