Parent/Child Teacher/Student Doctor/Patient

<p>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: <em>Rose Cohen</em> <em>asking/ her forty-year-old gay son/ if it's a phase</em>. 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.'</p><p>-<strong>Ronald W. Pies</strong> M.D. author of <em>The Unmoved Mover</em> and <em>The Levtov Trilogy</em>.</p><p><br></p><p>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.</p><p><br></p><p>-<strong>Joseph L. DeVitis</strong> Ph.D. editor of<em> The Future of American Higher Education: How Today's Public Intellectuals Frame the Debate</em></p><p>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.</p><p>-<strong>George H. Northrup</strong> Ph.D. author of<em> Wave into Wave Light into Light: Poems and Places</em></p>