Awards

• Commended for A Poetry Book Society Recommendation 2025
• Commended for Poetry Book Society Recommendation 2025

Overview

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 in what the poem calls a ‘slow, uncomely, cosmic dance’.

Full Product Details

9781800175242

Table of Contents

Reviews

‘John F. Deane’s new collection invites us to pause at the sea’s edge – whether sandy or steep – and look out into an uncontrolled vista of strangeness that is also life-giving. But we are also invited to look with the same patience and intensity into the mystery of memory, individual and familial, and the dark mystery of contemporary violence. These beautiful pieces, with all their clear and sensuous detail, are the work of a profound imagination constantly letting itself be “startled into certainties”, in one of Deane’s most resonant phrases.’ Rowan Williams

Author Information

John F. Deane was born on Achill Island, Co Mayo, Ireland. He is the founder of Poetry Ireland, the National Poetry Society, and The Poetry Ireland Review. He is founder of the Dedalus Press, of which he was editor from 1985 until 2006. In 2006 he was visiting scholar in the Burns Library of Boston College, and in 2016 was Teilhard de Chardin Fellow in Christian Studies, Loyola University, Chicago and taught a course in poetry. In 2019 he was visiting poet in Notre Dame University, Indiana. His poems have been translated into many languages and in 2022 the Polish Publisher, Znak, published his Selected Poems in Polish translation. Deane is the recipient of many awards for his poetry, he is a member of Aosdána, the body established by the Arts Council to honour artists 'whose work has made an outstanding contribution to the arts in Ireland'. In 2007 he was made Chevalier en l'ordre des arts et des lettres by the French Government. The fine arts press, Guillemot, Cornwall, in 2019 published a limited edition book, Like the Dewfall and in 2022 a further booklet, Voix Celeste, both with artwork by Tony Martin. In late 2022, Irish Pages Press published Darkness Between Stars, a selection of poems focusing on questions of faith and poetry by both John F. Deane and James Harpur, including an email dialogue on their individual writing processes. His latest collections from Carcanet are Naming of the Bones (2021) and Selected and New Poems (2023). Author photo taken by Moya Nolan.

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