Jonah and Me

A Poetry Book Society Recommendation

John F. Deane’s new book follows the publication of his career-spanning New and Selected Poems, which was published on the occasion of his eightieth birthday in 2023 and shows no relaxation in his descriptive and lyric powers.

Ireland’s foremost living religious poet, the new book includes a sequence, ‘Of Human Flesh’, which takes Easter’s rituals as its occasion, and dwells on its continuing purchase and meaning as the poet remembers others and walks a landscape where, sometimes, as he puts it, the spiritual and material worlds come together:

‘all here fits
together, oxbow and pillow-stone, holon and fractal,
stunning, admonishing, this morphogenic field.’

The poems bear witness to a number of different Irelands, and one memorable sequence tracks a family heirloom, a carriage clock, through three different marriages in 1897, 1906 and 1940. Alive to what is comical and even enchanting, his steadfast faith is as well captured in his grip on a childhood memory of Jonah, his ‘Bunnacurry mule, big and raw, / stubborn in hardship and unwilling’, with whom he is partnered in what the poem calls a ‘slow, uncomely, cosmic dance’.