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".

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.