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In setting the poets side by side, this volume also highlights the
two main faith traditions of the West: Deane with his Roman
Catholic background, rooted in the landscape of Mayo; and Harpur
with his Protestant (Church of Ireland and Quaker) heritage,
influenced by myth, medieval history and mystics. Their two
approaches to everyday life and ultimate reality - including
nature, saints and mystics, music, art, prayer, and issues of faith
and doubt - combine to make a single volume full of lyrical beauty
and powerful witness. In addition, an afterword consisting of an
informal dialogue between the two poets complements in prose the
themes their poems explore. This is a book to challenge, console,
delight and make its readers think again about their own journeys
through this "vale of soul-making".
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Selected and New Poems
John F. Deane
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R517
R417
Discovery Miles 4 170
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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.
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 hope justice
will overcome human greed and violence, while they assent to the
seasons developing of our landscapes and the beauty and dangers of
our place in creation. The sequence 'Like the Dewfall' works with
the music of the French composer Olivier Messiaen and his double
piano masterpiece, 'Visions de l'Amen', a suite of seven pieces for
two pianos, composed in 1943 during the Nazi Occupation of Paris.
Other poems connect the 'landscape, sea-scape and sky-scape' of the
Achill of Deane's formative years to the 'wonders of the Christian
faith' with a sacramental awareness that is a striking feature of
many of the poems. Fiona Sampson wrote in the Financial Times, 'The
poetry here is always beautiful, and always high stakes because
infused with spirituality.' And the theologian Cyril O'Regan
comments, 'if Deane is not a prophetic poet by most modern
standards - that is, we have to strain to hear denunciation -
nonetheless, precisely as a poet he understands himself to be a
witness: Poetry tells the truth that we would not tell, lifts the
veil on the human condition that we would prefer not to be lifted.'
News that the 2011 Nobel Prize for Literature had been awarded to
the Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer was greeted with widespread
approval by poets and poetry readers the world over. The author of
fifteen collections of poems, Transtromer had in fact been
nominated for the prize every year since 1993, a sign of his huge
standing and importance in world poetry, undiminished in recent
years despite a stroke in 1990 that left him partially paralyzed
and unable to speak. The Nobel citation praised Transtromer's poems
of "condensed, translucent images" which give us "fresh access to
reality," and that startling originality is everywhere to be seen
in the poems gathered here, first published as two separate volumes
by the Dedalus Press, The Wild Marketplace (1985) and For the
Living and the Dead (1994), both translated by John F. Deane, the
latter in collaboration with the poet himself.
A gypsy king dies, and a group of villagers seek to save him from
the dishonour of a pauper's grave. The dispute over the inheritance
of a well-field becomes a struggle between the 'old stock' and the
'new people' for the very ownership of their town. A terrier pup
reveals the truth of the relationship between a poacher and
gamekeeper. A deceitful boy and his bullying father are taught a
lesson by a schoolteacher. A seasoned drinker subverts the 'dry'
policy of a train chartered by a Pioneer pilgrimage. An old man
puts on his best suit for his own wake, telling his family he will
be dead by nightfall. And a blind woman only truly realizes her
blindness when forced to abandon her home. Stories of children, of
old people, of enduring friendships and close family ties form the
heart of Seamus de Faoite's Death of a King. As fresh as the day
they were written, these stories brilliantly celebrate an almost
vanished way of life. Here are stonemasons, coopers, barmen and
bakers - craftspeople with 'that feeling for the grain in green
stone, the vein in sweet timber, the gloss in the hide of dull
leather, the white lightness in grey troughs of dough'.Through his
skilled ear for the lyrical fire within the rhythms and rapidfire
wit of colloquial speech, de Faoite fashions often hilarious tales
that illuminate his characters' lives in all their toughness and
tenderness. Death of a King features a generous selection of de
Faoite's short fiction from The Bell, New Irish Writing, The Irish
Press and other periodicals - along with three previously
unpublished stories.
With `Crocus: a brief history’, John F. Deane sets his Dear
Pilgrims in motion, a series of brief histories of time, a time
that is rich in incident and in redemption. In a decisively secular
age, Deane’s is a poetry of Christian belief. It explores
renewal, alive with and to the kinds of witness he has learned from
George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins and R.S. Thomas. His `I’,
like theirs, makes space for a reluctant `us’. Dear Pilgrims
includes actual pilgrimages. The poet moves through England (East
Anglia in particular), Israel and Palestine, disclosing a `new
testament’ that revisions the Christian faith through the eyes of
an unknown female disciple of Christ. He vividly adapts the Middle
English poem Pearl and realises it for our time. He is also a
master of the sonnet as an instrument of love, doubt and faith. The
poet’s voice, perhaps because of the timeless wisdom it carries,
is vital and contemporary. It is no surprise that the founder of
Poetry Ireland and Dedalus Press is a poet of wide reading and
vision. The clarity of his verse and purpose makes his voice
unique. Rowan Williams celebrates his `Music, a stony, damp and
deeply alive landscape (both Ireland and the Holy Land), a
passionate and searching engagement with God’.
These poems of religiously shaped place and passion follow three
offices of the church, leading toward a world blessed by reason.
The voice is that of an Everyman fallen from grace who has the
boldness to trust in the possibility of belief. Single poems and
sequences, metered and free verse, make up this collection, in
which the Psalms have taken flesh with the passion that King David
knew and the grace that the Catholic mystics attest to.
A selection of contemporary European poetry in translation, edited
by John F Deane. Also featuring a selection of contemporary Irish
poets, among them Pat Boran, Peter Sirr, Enda Wyley and Gerard
Smyth. Essays include Fiona Sampson on Poetry Review.
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