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John
Deane has long been an important figure in Irish poetry, being a founder of Poetry
Ireland and The
Dedalus Press, but this selection of his published work from 2000 onwards
should raise his profile here. The oldest collection represented, Toccata
and Fugue (2000)
sets out his stall with economy: a poem like 'In Dedication' utilises the raw
Irish landscape and religious language to describe it - curlews cry 'small
alleluias of survival'. Any poem describing the first days of Genesis risks
recalling Geoffrey Hill's 'Genesis', but the 'suffering and joy' outlined
here sometimes resembles a softened, more optimistic R. S. Thomas. Where
Thomas offers doubt, however, Deane is more interested in transformation:
'Penance' offers a picture of transfiguration, recalling Stanley Spencer:
'They are hauling up / the bits and pieces of their lives...', and they return
with 'feet blistered'. Foxes, lambs and ewes also begin to haunt the
landscapes of his poems and 'Fugue', a longer sequence, takes the reader back
to the marsh roads and 'cattle shifting / languorously' in Achill Island,
Deane's birthplace.
Manhandling the Deity, from 2003, offers similar fare, but here the smaller lyrics seem
more powerful and concise. 'Nightwatch' and 'Fantasy in White' also bring a
poet's transforming eye to 'our suburban villages, our dormitory towns',
describing the ghostlike homeless 'who might/ be Plato, Luther, Hopkins but
for some tiny thing/ that slipped and shifted them a little to the side.'
They are interpreters, bearing occult knowledge. The second poem offers white
butterflies, 'winged snowflakes' bringing 'a moment of purest wonder'. Other
poems such as 'Canticle', also freeze a moment of wonder or epiphanic
revelation, 'the given note of a perfect / music' and the dead drifting in a
'vast sky'. In these volumes, though the longer sequences are impressive,
Deane is at his best in the jewel-like lyrics.
Deane's next two volumes, The Instruments of Art (2005) and A Little Book of
Hours (2008)
shift the focus slightly to include long meditations on art. The title
sequence of the former volume is dedicated to Edvard Munch, perhaps a
surprising name to encounter, but some familiar images shiver out from this
long sequence on art: 'the sky at sunset...opening its mouth to scream' and
later 'the bridge humming to your scream'. The close, sexually-charged
atmosphere of the painter's studio is explored, alongside illness, sex and
death: an exhibition confirms 'it is hard / to shake off darkness' and,
though the painter/poet hopes for a canvas 'filled/ with radiant colours', it
is stillness and darkness that ultimately reassert their presence. 'Madonna
and Child', a further long sequence from the 2008 collection, looks back at a
mother's death and again comes to rest on the 'stillness by the grave' but
ultimately includes other female voices, 'mothers, daughters, sisters...their
cries/ across time and space' crying against 'the pulling down of love' and
all the crucifixion-symbols thus implied. Once again, Deane reasserts an
ever-present religious meaning to his experiences, even in grief.
These are deep waters and Eye of the Hare (2011) is a more summery collection. In
'Shelf Life' Deane creates a beautiful meditation on the contents of a
cupboard shelf, and 'Sheets' offers another maternal memory, flapping sheets
becoming 'elemental arms, holding me in her love.' Several tender love poems
and a visit to Samuel Beckett's grave also offer evidence of the value of
selfless love. Finally, the collection also offers the long title-sequence,
forty pages of connected spiritual meditations which read like linked lyrics.
These are autobiographically orchestrated to illustrate Deane's love of
music, name-checking Britten, Bruckner, Handel and many others. The verse
forms offer chant-like responses and culminate in 'Coda', the birth of a
grand-daughter in Amsterdam on a 'red fox morning':
passage of
trams outside the window, iron-heavy, sparks
overhead, the
drift of spores like thistle-down migrations,
wool-gatherings on the floor of air; higher still
the trails of
jets, travellers, skylines, shifting off to take their place
along the
clouds; rabbits at their slow hip-hop...
'Listen!' Deane concludes, 'harmonies lifting into joy...out of the bleak black
soil of the earth', and after reading this collection one feels suitably
uplifted.
© M. C.
Caseley 2012
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