New Collection of Poems
In October of 2008 Carcanet published
John F. Deane's new collection of
poems:
A Little Book of Hours

See a review below
A Little Book of Hours takes as its
starting points John Donne's 'No man
is an island' and St Paul's letter to the
Corinthians: 'For just as the body is
one and has many members, and all
the members of the body, though
many, are one body, so it is with Christ'
In a series of linked sequences, John F. Deane explores the meanings of 'The Jesus Body,
the Jesus Bones', how each human being shares in a coherent universe in our world
broken by wars and violence. Beginning with the simplicities of island life, the book turns to
the politics of greed. King David, psalmist and warmonger, stands at the centre of the book,
in passages that look at humanity's destructiveness and creativity. Taking its cue from the
Psalms, the book concludes with journeys in search of truth and meaning, and a meditation
on guilt and innocence. A Little Book of Hours is Deane's deepest exploration of the
relevance of Christianity to our times. His music praises the beauty of wholeness in the
world and mourns what is broken.
The Poem of the Goldfinch


Write, came the persistent whisperings, a poem
on the mendacities of war. So I found shade
under the humming eucalyptus, and sat,
patienting. Thistle-seeds blew about on a soft breeze,
a brown-gold butterfly was shivering on a fallen
ripe-flesh plum. Write your dream, said Love, of the total
abolition of war. Vivaldi, I wrote, the four
seasons. Silence, a while, save for the goldfinch
swittering in the higher branches, sweet, they sounded,
sweet-wit, wit-wit, wit-sweet. I breathed
scarcely, listening. Love bade me write but my hand
held over the paper; tell them you, I said,
they will not hear me. A goldfinch swooped,
sifting for seeds; I revelled in its colouring, such
scarlets and yellows, such tawny, a patterning
the creator himself must have envisioned, doodling
that gold-flash and Hopkins-feathered loveliness. Please
write, Love said, though less insistently. Spirit, I answered,
that moved out once on chaos. . . No, said Love,
and I said Michelangelo, Van Gogh, No, write
for them the poem of the goldfinch and the whole
earth singing, so I set myself down to the task.
A new  book of essays has been published by
Columba Press: go here to view:

http://www.columba.ie/catalogue.php?cat=New
%20Publications&ISBN=9781856076142
The Irish Times Review, 10/01/09

A Little Book of Hours  
By John F.Deane, Carcanet, 100pp,

IT'S NO surprise that the founder of Poetry Ireland and Dedalus Press should be a poet of exceptionally wide
reading and vision, nor that his own work should be rich with cultural resonances.

What is astonishing, though, is to find at the very heart of a national - indeed an international - community a poet
who is writing like absolutely nobody else. It's the clarity of John F Deane's verse that makes his voice unique.
In the opening of The Luxembourg Poem ,

It is May, and the bells over
Walferdange
decry the struggle between
gravity and grace;
in the cemetery, pansy and
bluebell stand
in pewter bowls on
high-sheened marble tombs
and offer their hesitant
resurrexit , while high above
jets leave diminishing fishbone
trails;

There's nothing simple about these lines packed with symbolism - the doubled sense of "still life" in flowers, or
vapour trails that have been picked clean - nor the second line's push-me-pull-you riff on Simone Weil's idea of
Gravity and Grace . Yet, despite their complexity, they are easy to read - and they "lift off" into their May sky with
effortless speed. What generates such clarity is the absolute lack of any smudge of self-consciousness. For
this is ego-less verse; a set of extraordinarily beautiful spiritual exercises which "go by the way in which you
are not".

It is indeed a Book of Hours , and celebratory, as such books are. But that celebration is disciplined and costly.
The title-sequence of 34 poems turns a life-story into "a fading/ many-folded and torn map", of the way from
"the turf fire" hearth-side on Achill Island, through loss of vocation and bereavement, to "Villa Waldberta", a
foundation in Germany.
In the love-story it tells,
"I trace my finger on line and fold and contour/ and find you nowhere, and everywhere, the very way/ I cannot
point to any moment that is I, wholly/ and essentially, and yet in every moment it is/ you, and I, wholly and
essentially, unknown".

The unidentifiable self is unbounded; as the unbounded God is unidentifiable, even to the poet who sought him
in Novitiate and Seminary: "Mid-morning, when the others were at Lauds, / I crept away, a small suitcase in my
hand".

Faced with the limitless, and without the aid of conventional liturgy, the poet's response is to occupy the space
in which he finds himself. Deane brings music, detail and the human to inhabit unsayable abstraction. The
sound-world is directly addressed in poems such as Allegri and Water-Music , but it's also created by a
resonant rhetoric which combines unusual word-order and vocabulary with the chimes of assonance: "The day
was drawky, with a drawling mist / coming chill across the marshlands" ( To Market, To Market ).

Such details from the natural world abound - in Towards a Conversion , an orchid's "tiny shivering of petals" is
glimpsed where "Along the cuttings // bubbles lift through black water and escape" - but the imaginary is rich in
detail too:

. . . the water
dripping from her like
raindrops from the dark
laurels, rings on her fingers
catching the ooohs of the sun

This is Bethsabee , from A Book of Kings , one of this collection's two secondary sequences, both of them
crowded with human life. The other, Madonna and Child , juxtaposes the life and death of the poet's "Irish
Catholic mother, fortress / besieged, Tower of Ivory, House of Gold . . ." with scenes from the Madonna's life,
and joins grief for a lost mother to that of the Pieta: "crying against the pulling down of love".

Meanwhile, A Book of Kings retells stories surrounding David, the first poet of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
This world of lived experience is never completely separate from that of the Bible. Deane brings both alive with
an incantatory accumulation of detail, in which, for example, " velella velella , language-boats, come blooming
in their millions // over the sea's surface" to evoke the secular miracle of beauty.

No poet writing today takes this spiritual task so seriously: nor achieves it with such exemplary, luminous
grace.


Fiona Sampson