Selected and New Poems
John Deane opted for a "Selected and New" rather than the tombstone of a "Collected" to mark his eightieth year before heaven. He is still a living force, in physical and spiritual space: a Selected Poems ("Snow Falling on Chestnut Hill", 2012) already existed. With substantial new work to share, it seemed timely to produce an essential volume, with compelling new work added to underline his work as witness. He has emerged as one of Ireland's most important religious poets of recent times.
His poems explore the beauty of the island where he was born, on the west coast of Ireland, and the wonders of natural creation everywhere. His imagination is most at home in rural Ireland, where the long centuries of scholarship and faith have retained their focus and shape. Music is present everywhere in his selection, in the poems' lyricism and in their reference to composers and compositions, particularly Beethoven and Olivier Messiaen.
The poems move from a childhood encounter with a basking shark off his Achill Island home, to an elderly gentleman climbing the stairs to bed. A love of the landscape of his home island is developed in poems that combine an awareness of beauty and fragility with the spiritual significance the physical world offers those who are open to it. A "rewilding" of old certainties of faith and worship, a movement through the gifts of spirt and Spirit occur.
A new sequence, "For the Times and Seasons", completes this generous celebration of a long life spent, and still spending, in poetry and faith.
His poems explore the beauty of the island where he was born, on the west coast of Ireland, and the wonders of natural creation everywhere. His imagination is most at home in rural Ireland, where the long centuries of scholarship and faith have retained their focus and shape. Music is present everywhere in his selection, in the poems' lyricism and in their reference to composers and compositions, particularly Beethoven and Olivier Messiaen.
The poems move from a childhood encounter with a basking shark off his Achill Island home, to an elderly gentleman climbing the stairs to bed. A love of the landscape of his home island is developed in poems that combine an awareness of beauty and fragility with the spiritual significance the physical world offers those who are open to it. A "rewilding" of old certainties of faith and worship, a movement through the gifts of spirt and Spirit occur.
A new sequence, "For the Times and Seasons", completes this generous celebration of a long life spent, and still spending, in poetry and faith.
About the author
John F. Deane was born on Achill Island in 1943. He founded Poetry Ireland – the National Poetry Society – and "The Poetry Ireland Review" in 1978, and is the founder of The Dedalus Press, of which he was editor from 1985 until 2006. In 2008 he was visiting scholar in the Burns Library of Boston College. John F. Deane's poetry has been translated and published in France, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Romania, Italy, Slovakia, Sweden and other countries. His poems in Italian won the 2002 Premio Internazionale di Poesia Citta di Marineo. His fiction has been published by Blackstaff Press in Befast; his most recent novel "Where No Storms Come" was published by Blackstaff in 2011. He is the recipient of the O'Shaughnessy Award for Irish Poetry and the Marten Toonder Award for Literature. John F. Deane is a member of Aosdana, the body established by the Arts Council to honour artists "whose work had made an outstanding contribution to the arts in Ireland". His poetry has been shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award and the T. S. Eliot Prize. In 1996 Deane was elected Secretary-General of the European Academy of Poetry. In 2007 he was made Chevalier en l'ordre des arts et des lettres by the French government. He is currently the editor of Poetry Ireland Review.