John F. Deane

Canticle

In The Heather Fields, Reynolds' only friend has drowned and his neighbours have turned against him. Facing a cold and lonely future, he is simply marking time until his death, with only some pigs, chickens and the scolding shade of his mother for company. Life is as cruel as the land in The Eye of the Beholder. Living alone on a small, failing farm, Augustine Honeywell yearns for companionship, but God has dealt him 'a hand with not even one trump. Not an ace, not a king, not a knave; and above all, not a queen.' And in Down on the Farm, a modest lottery win allows the lustful Valentine Kidney to escape the 'wholesome and disinfected petting' that passes for romance in Killnamaine. Set in island communities in small-town rural Ireland, peopled with the marginalized and forgotten, these nine stories address life's most profound questions - the nature of existence and the purpose of being.

The Heather Fields and Other Stories

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.'

Naming of the Bones

These poems of religiously shaped place and passion follow three offices of the church, leading toward a world blessed by reason. The voice is that of an Everyman fallen from grace who has the boldness to trust in the possibility of belief. Single poems and sequences, metered and free verse, make up this collection, in which the Psalms have taken flesh with the passion that King David knew and the grace that the Catholic mystics attest to.

Manhandling the Deity

Religion, personal experiences of faith, and parallels between artistic and godly creation are explored in this collection of emotionally raw poems that focus on the suffering and love required by the God of the Old Testament and the poet's own struggle with religious endeavors. The lives, works, personal sacrifices, and inspirations of Edvard Munch, Van Gogh, and others are also discussed.

The Instruments of Art

A major new collection by this respected and influential Irish poet.

Christ, with Urban Fox

A Sequence of Poems

Blessed and Broken

The Hero, Home

This special publication presents an in-depth awareness of Achill Ireland in Ireland, combining poems and paintings from two acknowledged masters in their individual arts.

The Island

Achill

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’.

Dear Pilgrims

Venturing into the no-man's-land that lies between the warring forces of our existence John F. Dean emerges triumphantly with a cautionary but surpassingly compassionate novel.

In the Name of the Wolf

John F. Deane is a vital and generous presence in Irish poetry. New and Selected Poems gathers work from Deane's five previous Carcanet collections, alongside a new sequence, Snow Falling on Chestnut Hill. Written with an inquiring intelligence, these poems of a dozen years meditate on the relevance of Christian spirituality to our troubled times. Each of the twelve poems in the title sequence presents a movement of the spirit, from the author's childhood in the west of Ireland, through the death of a wife, to the birth of a grandchild. Arranged in the manner of an orchestral symphony, each section takes its cue from a different piece of music, from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony to Mozart's Laudate Dominum'. The sequence traces, phase by phase, the development of a Christian life. Faith, in its broadest sense, is inflected by imagination.

New and Selected Poems

Snow Falling on Chestnut Hill

Walking on Water

John F. Deane is a vital presence in contemporary Irish poetry. The poems in Semibreve 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. Throughout, Deane gives poetic voice to the paradox of human existence as simultaneously blessed and broken'.

John F. Deane

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