About this book
I will miss his teachers’ disciplinary notes,
So artfully phrased and painstakingly inoffensive
Robert H. Deluty again masterfully weaves together the inside and outside of family matters and other relationships essential to our lives and upbringing – in this case, personal and public aspects of being a parent, teacher, doctor or a child, student, patient. Senryus separate and link Deluty’s meditations on how and to what extent educating can be healing for the individual soul and for generations to come.
Advance Praise
“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
About the Author
Dr. Robert H. Deluty is Associate Dean Emeritus of the Graduate School at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. A psychology professor at UMBC from 1980 to 2016, he was named Presidential Teaching Professor in 2002.
Dr. Deluty’s poems and essays have been published in The Wall Street Journal, The Baltimore Sun, The Pegasus Review, Modern Haiku, Voices: The Art and Science of Psychotherapy, Psychiatric Times, Jewish Currents, the Journal of Poetry Therapy, Welcome Home, Muse of Fire, Maryland Family Magazine,Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture, The Faculty Voice, and many other newspapers, journals, and anthologies.
Parent/Child, Teacher/Student, Doctor/Patient is his sixty-sixth book.
"Euphemisms"
More than the late morning school bus send-offs,
And the parent-friendly homework assignments,
And even the wonderfully awful band recitals,
I will miss his teachers’ disciplinary notes,
So artfully phrased and painstakingly inoffensive:
“David had much difficulty today controlling his
enthusiasm.”
“David is very anxious to share his insights with
his neighbors.”
“David never misses the opportunity to find humor
in seemingly serious situations.”
The eleven-year-old class clown,
Graduating to middle school,
Should be thankful for teachers who
Should have been diplomats.
"Alone"
As a child in the city
He would dream:
Coming home from school,
All apartment houses on his block
Became precisely the same –
No numbers on buildings,
No letters on doors,
No names on mailboxes.
He couldn’t remember
What floor he lived on.
To find his parents,
Every door in every building
Had to be knocked,
Every occupant, disturbed.
He would awaken
Before finding his home,
Crying, terrified.
Thirty years later,
The dream returns –
Not in his sleep,
But when he enters
His child’s bedroom
To hold and comfort
In the middle of the night.
"Saturdays"
He, raised Orthodox,
Loved the teachings,
Ambivalent about the practice.
His wife, raised agnostic,
Attracted to the fellowship,
Bewildered by the rituals.
Their sons, 7 and 5,
Wanting to spend the morning
In T-shirts, jeans, sneakers.
The family compromise:
Sabbath services at
The Public Library.
