A Little Book of Hours is the most recent of these books to reach my desk, and it is by far the most ambitious and complex of those under review, so this must be in the form of a provisional report. Here is a poet who is fulfilling a destiny, and his journey takes him to very different realms from most other writers today. The only poet I can compare him with is Thomas Kinsella; both have a passionately engaged high style, pursue political and religious themes, and remain doggedly unfashionable. Kinsella locates his vision largely in urban Ireland, though, whilst John F. Deane’s preoccupations find their focus in rural, mainly west-coast land and sea-scapes.

It is difficult to do justice to the scope of this work in a short review. It embraces many contradictions: it is tortured and celebratory; it is religious and secular; it is particular and general; it is personal and impersonal; it is rugged and mellifluous. It employs an extensive vocabulary and a wide range of reference. No doubt it would aid appreciation if one were to share Deane’s beliefs (and his doubtings) but it is by no means essential; one is carried along by the strength of feeling and the sheer exuberance of the language. Here are some extracts to illustrate his virtuosity:

                                   The waters of the world
begin in the dribble-drain down by the road
and the tall ships, the galleons, the quinqueremes
nudge on the hawthorn twig that goes swirling,

seawards there. But oh! what water-music, what slick
picking of rain-drops and raddle-run low-tongued roll
of the littler drums.


                                              Over everything
voraciously, the crow, a monkish body hooded

in grey, crawks its blacksod, cleansing music;
lay your flesh down here you will become
carrion-compost, sustenance for the ravening roots;
where God is, has been, and will ever be.


I trace my finger on line and fold and contour
and find you nowhere, and everywhere, the very way
I cannot point to any moment that is I, wholly
and essentially, and yet in every moment it is
you, and I, wholly and essentially, and unknown.

The first of these, a poem called ‘A Flood and Many Waters’, is strong on word-music, with its headlong build-up, taking composite words and inventions in its stride. One senses Hopkins as an influence here. The second quotation comes from ‘Towards a Conversion’, and consists of the climactic lines. Here the poet is rubbing our noses in materiality (what Georgia Scott has identified as ‘beautiful rendering of unbeautiful things’) yet emerging with an aspect of the spiritual clutched in his hand in that shockingly unexpected last line. The third text comes from the title sequence, an autobiography made up of thirty-four poems in seven sections (as in the Middle Ages prayer books). Deane refers to this enterprise as ‘a fading/many folded and torn map’ hence the reference in the first line quoted. He is talking of his lover, taken from him by her early death.

Although individual poems can stand alone, the book is a series of interlinked sequences, the whole forming a kind of jewel held up to the light. The facets shine out in turn and also serve to illuminate each other. Many of these surfaces are fierce and blinding, however. It is no accident that one of the poems is called ‘A Cold Comforting’. The title of the book itself, however, could be considered misleading: there is nothing ‘little’ about this collection.