


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