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) alrea...

The poems in "Naming of the Bones" touch on Christian values and work towards a significant faith, at the same time focusing on the wonders of an evolving cosmos. The poems delight in the things of the earth, suggesting a secular Christianity. They h...

John F. Deane's poetry of Christian belief in a decisively secular age explores how redemption and renewal might emerge. He writes in the sincere, troubled, wide-awake tradition of Gerard Manley Hopkins and R. S. Thomas. Like theirs, his concerns are...

John F. Deane is a vital presence in contemporary Irish poetry. The poems in "Semibreve" combine lyric grace with a fiercely questing intelligence, pushing against the mysteries of faith in a fractured world, paying tribute to the value of human life...

John F. Deane is a vital and generous presence in Irish poetry. New and "Selected Poems" gathers work from Deane's five previous Carcanet collections, alongside a new sequence, "Snow Falling on Chestnut Hill". Written with an inquiring intelligence,...

"Eye of the Hare" affirms a spirituality for healing a shattered world. In a richly textured collection, layered with Biblical echoes and the music of the Psalms, John F. Deane explores the possibilities of poetry to redress the failures of care towa...

"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...

"The Instruments of Art" uses poetry to explore the lives and works of Edvard Munch, Vincent Van Gogh and others, the personal sacrifice involved, the singular vision and inspiration that set them in motion. God's creation, some argue, is a work of a...

This is a book full of one God in many aspects, at once strange and intimate, transcendent and physical, Son of the Almighty yet born of woman. The book, sacramentally shaped, follows three "offices" of the church, leading us towards an altar then re...

In Toccata and Fugue John F. Deane selects from the full range of his work a representative core. He emerges as a substantial and original poet, for whom the old verities retain some of their truth and the accelerating fin-de-siecle is not an unmitig...