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