Alison Brackenbury, Poetry Review Issue 96:1, Spring 2006:

Fluent Musics

Lapsed from Protestantism to cheerful paganism, I bring no automatic sympathy to John F. Deane's renderings of a Catholic childhood through The Instruments of Art. But the forms of Deane's art are strongly felt and seductive, secure in line, reassuring in rhyme. 'Late October Evening' takes a certain kind of melodious, rhymed lyric almost to perfection. It melts readers' resistance to divisivley old-fashioned diction, as Deane's cadences melt across lines, and the dead return - "like a slow galleon under black sail / nearing". The sea that haunts the poems ebbs into the writer's own calm, "the tide brimming, then falling away".

But Deane's work can also divide art from life by sermoning. The kingfisher's flesh fades into "the high / Shock of what is beautiful". His art can lack variety; the "small light on the Pilot wireless" glows several times, like an old story from a forgetful relative. Most divisive is his passion for writing about paintings/. The sections about art, though careful, can be leaden.

Yet Deane's accounts of his faith achieve a music with "the fluency of water", in long lines which can accommodate the varying movement of animal and man, as in 'Canvas':

and once a heron passed, like one of those heaving crates
from an old war.

Is the mastery of the long line shown by American poets, in part, a gift from Ireland? Certainly Deane's early stories of belief are securely weighed and connected to the plants and animals of Achill. "!And when they spoke of lilies of the field / I thought of 'flaggers' and of meadowsweet". His ear for birds - "a wren jitters" - is startingly tender.

Since faith, and poetry, need not divide time, Deane's 'Adagio Molto' can flow wittily in a single line, from Mary "passionate and at work" to "the window-cleaner [...] at the twenty-seventh floor". But suffering disrupts his harmonies. At the end of 'In the Teeth of the Wolf', a terrible poem of a painful death, the aggressive rhythms bear no reconciling music. "I refused / belief in You, Creator. Bridegroom. Wolf." Though Christ reappears, to cook fish, before "his / slow disappearance among the shore-line trees", it is a shock to learn that only with death's "astonishing" division "may you have attained / at last, the fluency of water".

So, at that clouded time when the Old Year slides into the New, with long illness and a rain-soaked garden, I read and re-read the music of John Deane: a fine poet for our lives' divided seasons.