Spring 2009

A Sense of Place

John Deane's remarkable collection - remarkable in its ambition to write a kind of spiritual autobiography and to explore in a secular age the meaning of religious belief - is not just shot through with a sense of the landscape, flora, fauna of his native Ireland, especially his birthplace, Achill Island, in Co. Mayo in the West of Ireland, but also with the search for a place on the map of belief.  He presumes on the understanding of a largely non-religious contemporary poetry readership which may struggle to appreciate the theological furniture of his mind, and make sense of such concepts as 'The Jesus Body, the Jesus Bones' - as one section is called.  His epigraphs, from Donne ('No man is an island...') and St. Paul's letter to the Corinthians ('all the members of the body, though many, are one body') make it clear that these connected sequences are concerned with the individual's attempts to participate in a larger universe of faith. 

Yet - a handful of eloquent declarations of faith apart - this is not pious stuff.  Deane's vivid painting of the landscapes he has lived in and the details of his own life woven into the poems, ensure that these poems are linguistically rich (words like 'frangible', 'crenulated', 'drawky', 'stravaiging' send one scurrying to the dictionary) and absorbing.  One is drawn, without any overt proselytising from the poet, into the range of his concerns which are displayed most strikingly by individual short sections are linked to specific places on the poet's life-map, to see if you / figure there, or how' (pg. 48), he begins, the address to his God embracing us the readers.  He passes through evocations 'with a stump of white chalk' (p. 51) on 'a squared-off piece of black slate' (p.51) the word GOD, to adolescent attempts to fathom the meaning of suffering, to puzzle out on rainy afternoons by the Atlantic how 'the long and unwilled / suffering of flesh, might somehow be a little more /  than the unwilled suffering of flesh' (p. 52). Deane's style, though occasionally lush and linguistically dense, is more often characterised by a fluency and limpidness as in this passage from his Jesuit schooldays:

One early summer evening I stood in the abandoned
college field, goalposts white and still, like footmen
left with no one to wait upon, and the air replete
with thrushes' songs, something young and independent
yielded in me, something passed in the dusk above me
ruffling my hair and I was taken by incorrigible sorrow. (p.53)

Some readers might find this kind of writing portentous - especially that antique-sounding 'incorrigible sorrow' - but it worked for me and how else and with what other kind of register does one write about these questions?  Deane passed through a Catholic seminary near Dublin where in spite of the intense spiritual discipline into which he threw himself, 'in my own soul /  disorder swelled and I found / nothing in mind or body that would answer / questions I could not find the words to frame' (p.56), and he eventually 'crept away, a small suitcase in my hand' (p. 57) while Lauds were being sung.  Yet this was not the end of his spiritual journey which traversed love, which ended in a tragic death, and in turn he found love again 'amazed at life's new energies' (p.61).  In one poem in this sequence he writes about his very question of how one discusses God.  He cannot write the word but prefers to write 'sea-mew; fuschia; city; moon' (p.64), the poetry, to amend William Carlos Williams, in no theological idea but in things, the poet all too aware that 'people mock and say that God / is not fit subject for our century' (p. 64).  The sequence ends in a kind of armed truce with this deity with whom he has wrestled through a lifetime: 'Your absence, your unreplying shade, refusal / to give yourself a name, I resent.' (p.66)

In this and the remaining poems, one longer one dealing with the theme of the Madonna and child into which his relationship with his own mother is inscribed, Deane succeeds, I think, in pulling off the risky feat of writing convincingly about religious experience in the twenty-first century in a way that makes for memorable poetry and speaks to those who do not share his theological concerns.