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.
