In the opening essays in the collection, The Works of Love, John.F.Deane describes a crucifix which hung on the wall of his parents 'house': 'and always Christ Crucified, the Cross, the Rood, a deeply probing and mortifying presence.'
The transition here from 'cross' to 'rood' encapsulates Deane's strategies in relation to the Catholic faith to which he remains loyal, and the broader culture of Christian art in which he wishes to re-situate this faith. The term 'rood' (Old English for 'cross') opens up the world of English and Gaelic religious poetry, which pre-dated by centuries the narrow authoritarian Catholicism of Deane's youth, and which has outlived it.
So in the 40 essays which make up The Works' of Love Deane discusses poets such as Hervert, Marvell, Vaughan, Hopkins, Kavanagh and Wendell Berry, combining literary analysis with poems, autobiographical motifs and cultural history. Deane's treatment of one autobiographical motif, the monastery of the Third Order of St Francis on his birthplace of Achill Island, exemplifies this approach.
The relelvant essay is entitled 'Canticle of the Creatures'. Deane begins with a description of childhood visits to the monastery and the wood he has to pass through in the dark.
A contrasting overview of the role the monastery played on Achill s then offered in a poem. The strategy of dual narrative is maintained throughuot the essay, and the literary references also draw on religious poetry (Dante's dark woods, Hopkins on the wreck of the Deutschland), and secular narrative (Cervantes Don Quixote).
Embedded in Deane's prose account of Francisian spirituality, including its repect for the natural world is his translation of Francis's poem, Canticle of the Creatures. Deane continues with an evocation of the now ruined monastery, in prose and then verse. He conclues with an affirmation of the religious faith that was passes on to him by the Francisians, in 'the weathers of the old Catohlic Ireland' but also signals the later 'opening of his spirit' both as believer and as artist.
The poems of the collection Eye of the Hare are thematically linked to the essays. Deane fulfills in them his desire to 'conjugate Chrst', to explore in language both the incarnation and the natural world in which this incarnation is continually renewed. The entry into nature is achieved through the 'round dark eye' of the hare, or 'the tarnished china of a sheep-skull and the windy acres of its eyes'.
Faith, in the broadest and most generous sense, is successfully inflected by imagination. In the sonnet The Marble Rail for instance, the choice of narrative detail and image enable the reader to perceive the taking of communion in both its significance and its ambiguity, as the 'I' of the poem takes 'the strange moon-bread' and records 'the melting of ashes' across his tongue.
The Bunnacury crossroads of Deane's birthplace have been gradually elaborated by him, in his career as poet, essayist, translator and novelist, into a meeting-place of languages, genres and cultures.