Kirjahaku

With `Crocus: a brief history’, John F. Deane sets his Dear Pilgrims in motion, a series of brief histories of time, a time that is rich in incident and in redemption. In a decisively secular age, Deane’s is a poetry of Christian belief. It explores renewal, alive with and to the kinds of witness he has learned from George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins and R.S. Thomas. His `I’, like theirs, makes space for a reluctant `us’. Dear Pilgrims includes actual pilgrimages. The poet moves through England (East Anglia in particular), Israel and Palestine, disclosing a `new testament’ that revisions the Christian faith through the eyes of an unknown female disciple of Christ. He vividly adapts the Middle English poem Pearl and realises it for our time. He is also a master of the sonnet as an instrument of love, doubt and faith. The poet’s voice, perhaps because of the timeless wisdom it carries, is vital and contemporary. It is no surprise that the founder of Poetry Ireland and Dedalus Press is a poet of wide reading and vision. The clarity of his verse and purpose makes his voice unique. Rowan Williams celebrates his `Music, a stony, damp and deeply alive landscape (both Ireland and the Holy Land), a passionate and searching engagement with God’.

The poems in Naming of the Bones touch on Christian values and work towards a significant faith, at the same time focusing on the wonders of an evolving cosmos. The poems delight in the things of the earth, suggesting a secular Christianity. They hope justice will overcome human greed and violence, while they assent to the seasons developing of our landscapes and the beauty and dangers of our place in creation. The sequence 'Like the Dewfall' works with the music of the French composer Olivier Messiaen and his double piano masterpiece, 'Visions de l’Amen', a suite of seven pieces for two pianos, composed in 1943 during the Nazi Occupation of Paris. Other poems connect the 'landscape, sea-scape and sky-scape' of the Achill of Deane's formative years to the 'wonders of the Christian faith' with a sacramental awareness that is a striking feature of many of the poems. Fiona Sampson wrote in the Financial Times, 'The poetry here is always beautiful, and always high stakes because infused with spirituality.' And the theologian Cyril O'Regan comments, 'if Deane is not a prophetic poet by most modern standards – that is, we have to strain to hear denunciation – nonetheless, precisely as a poet he understands himself to be a witness: Poetry tells the truth that we would not tell, lifts the veil on the human condition that we would prefer not to be lifted.'

John F. Deane opted for a Selected and New rather than the tombstone of a Collected to mark his eightieth year before heaven. He is still a living force, in physical and spiritual space: a Selected Poems (Snow Falling on Chestnut Hill, 2012) already exists. With substantial new work to share, it seemed timely to produce an essential volume, with compelling new work added to underline his witness. Deane's poems explore the beauty of the island where he was born, on the west coast of Ireland, and the wonders of natural creation everywhere. His imagination is most at home in rural Ireland, where the long centuries of scholarship and faith have retained their focus and shape. Music is present everywhere in his selection, in the poems' lyricism and in their reference to composers and compositions, particularly Beethoven and Olivier Messiaen. The poems move from a childhood encounter with a basking shark off his Achill Island home, to an elderly gentleman climbing the stairs to bed. A love of the landscape of his home island is developed in poems that combine an awareness of beauty and fragility with the spiritual significance the physical world offers those who are open to it. A 'rewilding' of old certainties of faith and worship, a movement through the gifts of spirit and Spirit occur. A new sequence, 'For the Times and Seasons', completes this generous celebration of a long life spent, and still spending, in poetry and faith.

John F. Deane is a vital presence in contemporary Irish poetry. The poems in this new collection combine lyric grace with a fiercely questing intelligence, pushing against the mysteries of faith in a fractured world, paying tribute to the value of human life and love. Running through the book is a thread of elegy for the poet's brother, who died of cancer in 2010. The collection concludes with a sequence describing a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Throughout, Deane gives poetic voice to the paradox of human existence as simultaneously 'blessed and broken'.

A Poetry Book Society Recommendation John F. Deane’s new book follows the publication of his career-spanning New and Selected Poems, which was published on the occasion of his eightieth birthday in 2023 and shows no relaxation in his descriptive and lyric powers. Ireland’s foremost living religious poet, the new book includes a sequence, ‘Of Human Flesh’, which takes Easter’s rituals as its occasion, and dwells on its continuing purchase and meaning as the poet remembers others and walks a landscape where, sometimes, as he puts it, the spiritual and material worlds come together: ‘all here fits together, oxbow and pillow-stone, holon and fractal, stunning, admonishing, this morphogenic field.’ The poems bear witness to a number of different Irelands, and one memorable sequence tracks a family heirloom, a carriage clock, through three different marriages in 1897, 1906 and 1940. Alive to what is comical and even enchanting, his steadfast faith is as well captured in his grip on a childhood memory of Jonah, his ‘Bunnacurry mule, big and raw, / stubborn in hardship and unwilling’, with whom he is partnered in what the poem calls a ‘slow, uncomely, cosmic dance’.

John F. Deane shapes his new collection, Manhandling the Deity, in a framework that calls to mind the Roman Catholic mass, celebrated for the living and the dead. The poems test out ways of living in the contemporary world while navigating by the lights of traditional belief. Spiritual and poetic urgency are here of a piece. Deane writes as a fallen Everyman on a redemptive journey. Sacramental forms lead the reader on through single poems and sequences: sonnets, free verse and translations are touched with the same grace, until, as he says in ‘Canticle’, ‘the universe stills to…the given note of a perfect music’.