Church Life Journal: John F. Deane’s Poetry of Praise
This is an article by Cyril O’Regan about Irish poet John F Deane. It was recommended by an ACP member.
Link to article:
Excerpt from Poetry International on John F Deane
Biography…by James Harpur from Poetry International website
https://www.poetryinternational.com/en/poets-poems/poets/poet/102-21538_Deane
John F. Deane is one of the most gifted and influential poets in Ireland, not only from his formidable corpus of more than a dozen poetry books and essays and prose, but also because of what he has founded and organised in the Irish poetry world. His talent as a writer and commitment to poetry have been recognised not just in Ireland – by, for example, membership of Aosdána – but across Europe with awards from, among others, France (Chevalier de l’ordre des arts et des letters), Serbia (The Golden Key of Smederevo) and Italy (Laudomia Bonanni International Award).
Deane’s tenacity to express a spiritual vision in what many might suppose is rapidly becoming a post-Catholic, and even post-Christian, Ireland marks him out as a voice crying in the wilderness, but a cry softened by the cadences of otherworldly music. At the heart of his holistic vision of things is a conviction that the divine manifests itself materially as an echo of the Incarnation; mountains, sea, rivers, birds, the rugged landscape of his native Co. Mayo – all are exempla of a divine handiwork threaded with a luminosity that Deane reveals in his lines.
Like all profound poets, Deane writes a single poem, but its variations reach out to embrace all of human life, from affecting elegies to celebrations of the grandeur of God. Ever glimmering in the background of his poems is the presence of Christ, as a mystery, a figure of ineffable love, as Meister Eckhart’s “ground of the soul” – a touchstone against which Deane is always testing his probing imagination. Yet Deane is never narrowly pious or blinkered in his religiosity, always reaching out towards creation with an open heart and mind, offering it his singular gift of verbal fluency.
Deane was born on Achill Island in Co. Mayo in 1943 and nearly found his way into the priesthood. Instead, he took the cloth of secular society and began to work out his destiny in the cloisters of the imagination. In 1979 he founded Poetry Ireland – the national poetry society – and Poetry Ireland Review (of which he became editor in 2011), twin establishments that have nourished generations of Irish poets.
In 1985 he founded Dedalus Press, another seedbed of Irish poetry, and one that from the start looked out towards Europe and the translation of continental poets. Indeed, Deane, though rooted in the soil of his motherland, has always looked beyond his native horizons to the literary traditions of other countries.
Raised by a father who taught himself Russian and German to appreciate better the words of Gogol, Pushkin, Dostoevsky and Goethe, Deane has been an enthusiast of continental poetics, from Elisabeth Borchers to Tomas Tranströmer. Equally, he has absorbed the work of his Irish forebears as well as English religious and nature poets of the metaphysical and post-Romantic eras, including George Herbert, John Clare and Gerard Manley Hopkins…