It is one of the ironies of the last century that in an Ireland that flexed its literary muscle in a way unmatched before that, when not an object of criticism, Catholicism was essentially exiled. This is particularly so when it comes to religious or Christian poetry which over the decades came to be dismissed as nostalgic or second rate at best and an oxymoron at worst. While there have been any number of major Irish poets since W.B. Yeats, for example, Patrick Kavanagh (1904-67), Thomas Kinsella (1928-2021), John Montague (1929-2016), Seamus Heaney (1939-2013), Paul Muldoon (1951-), Eaven Boland (1944-2020), and Eilean Ni Chuilleanain (1942-), et al., with the possible exception of Kavanagh, none can be called a religious poet, and, arguably, Kavanagh is a religious poet only in the sense that occasionally he addresses religious themes, perhaps above all his great poem “Lough Derg,” the famous penitential site, but even here only to lay bare the empty hopes and craven fears of the faithful.
It would seem odd that with all the advantages of its inherited Catholic tradition that Irish literature has failed to produce a religious poet that matches the stature in English verse of T.S. Eliot or Geoffrey Hill, or the great Welsh poet, David Jones. An Irish writer who has pondered this relative eclipse is the poet John F. Deane (1943-). Deane gives us a sense as to this dearth in his early edited volume, Irish Poetry of Faith and Doubt: The Cold Heaven (1991). The subtitle, drawn from a poem by Yeats, is eloquent regarding the difficulty. If Deane does not put this into Nietzsche’s trendy language of the “death of God,” nonetheless, Yeats’ diagnosis of “cold heaven” carries with it Nietzsche’s meaning that would not have been out of line for a Yeats enamored with the kind of reconstructions of a Romantic such as Blake who supposed the dismissal of the transcendent and legislative God of Christianity.
What is interesting is how tentative Deane is in pointing to a religious poetry that is neither cant nor kitsch and ultimately how few the representatives are. He presents five poems by Kavanagh, but does not excerpt “Lough Derg” in the way he excerpts Kavanagh’s other major long poem, “The Great Hunger.” While he modestly includes five poems of his own, there are perhaps only two poets—Padraig J. Daly (1943-) and Paul Murray (1947-), both priests—who fairly unabashedly recommend Christianity in a time when Ireland belatedly was beginning to experience the ebbing, the “great withdrawing roar” of the form of Catholicism that had been the mainstay in Ireland into the modern period.
Arguably, Deane was in a privileged position to see the problem, finding himself somewhat betwixt and between. Certainly, no poet could enjoy or enjoin the complacency of having the transcendent referent in sight and resorting to the institutional Church as its guarantee. His own poems suggest some of this ambiguity. On the one hand, in his anthology “Matins” he recalls a form of conventional prayer that belonged to a moment in his life that could not be repeated, whereas “Penance” relives a kind of holy terror reminding of a thoughtlessly angry God and a thoroughgoing controlling Church.
In contrast, however, in the three other poems, “Monasterboice” (a ruined monastery), “Francis of Assisi,” and “The Great Skellig” (rock off the Southwest coast of Ireland that in the first millennium housed monks as well as birds), there is not only nostalgia but astonished admiration. In a more recent book, The Outlaw Christ: The Response in Poetry, to the Question Who Do You Say I Am (2020), while his explicit theme is not modern Irish religious poetry, he does in fact discuss at some length two contemporary Irish religious poets, Padraig J. Daly (1943-) and James Harpur (1956-), the latter born in England, but living in Ireland. Though he acknowledges the conventional ambit of Daly’s verse, he is sufficiently impressed with Daly’s technical craft and ability to interrogate as well as present Catholic faith to title him Ireland’s most accomplished religious poet, a judgment tempered only by his growing and glowing admiration for the stately lines of James Harpur in which deep reflection is wedded to sharply rendered and religiously inflected experience. If, for Deane, Daly represents the present and recent past of religious poetry in Ireland, Harpur represents its future.
While I take Deane’s recommendation of Harpur very seriously, and think poems such as “Encounter” and “Augustine: Letter to God” commend Daly to our attention, it seems evident that Deane is denying the obvious: he is the Irish religious poet of the present and presumably the near future also, since his poetry is still in the process of being received. Not only are his early religious poems already mentioned a match for anything produced by Daly, but the extent and quality of his production of religious poetry over the past decades is simply of another order than what has been produced in Ireland for decades. If there really is a recovery of faith in contemporary Irish poetry, I want to suggest that it flows through him. Fittingly, then, his poetry, characterized by poetic image, surprise, stunned belief, and praise, is the theme of this essay.
Deane’s Prelude
In his luminous memoir, Song of a Goldfinch (2023), Deane offers an account of his life that is in effect a Bildungsroman of how he became a poet and once that was settled moved tentatively but firmly towards being the kind of experimental and ecstatic religious poet he now is in his later years. Over time, this has involved the undoing of a passive religious self that reflects the obedience mandated Irish Catholicism for most of the twentieth century, and the embrace of a form of a Christocentric and pneumatic Christianity that embraces Christ at once as cosmic and as scandalous historical Jewish particular who is funneled into our dark history by the Spirit who gives light and life and distributes Christ as Word. Deane supplies the basic facts of a long life engaged with the arts (music as well as poetry) from birth and childhood on Achill island, through the education of his teenage years in Limerick, his time at the minor and major seminaries for the missionary Holy Ghost fathers, his abrupt leaving of the seminary, and the gradual leaching of the old faith riveted in a juridical and authoritarian Catholic regime that brooked no dissent and which in the emerging secular Ireland would prove no match for the hungering for autonomy and the prerogatives of modernity that marked the last decades of the twentieth century.
This leaving aside of a specific Catholic regime, however, was by no means a final settling of accounts. Besides obvious nostalgia, outside of the Catholic Church as power broker, the aesthetic and heroic elements of Catholicism continued to exercise a pull as Deane took up W.B. Yeats’ mandate to learn the poetic trade. This Deane did for decades, writing extraordinary lyric poems that refused to stray from what is strikingly given. If even before the boiling over of religious interest he was an aficionado of G.M. Hopkins, on whom he wrote for his M.A., he was also an admirer of Seamus Heaney, who, also influenced by Hopkins, aimed at his capacity for image while bracketing Hopkins’ religious commitments. In this apprenticeship as a naturalist offering luminous descriptions of animals and birds that emblazon our world should we let them, and loving recall of loved and lost ones over the course of his life, Deane essentially resettles his faith after the pattern of Saint Francis of Assisi, but does so under the mystical and philosophical tutelage of the Jesuit paleontologist and mystic, Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955). The Franciscan pattern and its Teihhardian frame are synthesized and consummated in the fantastic and fantastically adventurous musical compositions of Olivier Messiaen (1900-1992).
If in Song of the Goldfinch Deane provides the history of this making of a poet and subsequently religious poet in prose, he annotates this history by poems, mainly but not exclusively taken from prior collections, that mark episodes and entanglements of the self distant from the psyche that can do due honor to reality, but in hindsight perhaps necessary for his formation as a poet. What this accomplishment (with all its very human imperfections) looks like is given in the title, which in turn is a variant of “Poem of the Goldfinch” from A Book of Hours (2008). Deane has not been shy about offering manifestos for poetry—and continues to do so—but clearly he privileges the one provided in this collection. In the poem Deane rehearses the various options for poetry whether thematic or imaginative, but concludes:
No, write
For them the poem of the goldfinch and the whole
Earth singing, so I set myself down to the task.
Deane goes on to specify the vision as connected with creative evolution (de Chardin) and with Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. These influences are horizonal and indirect. Within the poem, the person most responsible for the peculiarities of the poetic manifest is another poet, in fact none other than G.M. Hopkins. Evoking simultaneously “The Windhover” and “As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” Deane writes:
A goldfinch swooped
sifting for seeds; I reveled in its colouring, such
scarlets and yellows, such tawny, a patterning
the creator himself must have envisioned, doodling
that gold-flash and Hopkins-feathered loveliness.
Hopkins is here made heraldic as he makes Christ heraldic not only by the recall of the epiphanies provided by birds but by the language itself, specifically by the accent on “loveliness” and the use of hyphens. Hopkins is regarded by Deane as sufficiently elemental to justify being an aspect of experience rather than simply an allusion to a poetic authority who provides a measure whereby a poem can be judged, though Hopkins surely plays that role also.
Deane’s manifesto demands attentiveness to the particular and singular always in danger of being covered over in general categories and the correlative scruple in language to bear epiphany that might intimate the even deeper breakthrough of theophany. For either form of breakthrough to occur, however, there has to be sacrifice, in the first instance the sacrifice of the ego that must be put aside in acquiring the habit of receiving reality as gift, and in the second a relativization of the rhetorical accoutrements of the English literary tradition that can fade not only into self-posturing, but also a kind of second-orderness that blurs distinction between showing and saying, to avail of the language of the early Wittgenstein, but without yielding to his intended (positivistic) meaning.
For Deane, the focus should be on minute particulars; light should be shone on all that in nature and in mind is emergence, kinesis, or event, whether birds, of animals such as otters, seals, foxes, or the flora and fauna of Achill island, the Holy Land, or California where his priest brother, Declan, lived for much of his life. Perhaps given the influence of Hopkins, we might point to Deane’s voluminous breviary of birds that for him are a privileged site of the sacred, the common robin and wren of Irish lore, the intermediate kind of bird that seems to be simply there like the crow, jackdaw, gull, gannet, petrel, then, the swallows and blackbirds that may have a little more romance bred into the light avian bones that hold them aloft, and then the group of birds that include goldfinches as well as other finches, tom-tits and blue-tits who open selves to beauty, and soaring sublimely above all others the starlings who function as nothing less than a symbol of cosmic unity in plurality that is dynamic, urgently shaping patterns and unshaping and shaping again, the blurs of shape accompanied by whirs of sound.
Perhaps a presentation of those poems that accompany Deane’s prose account of his history that represents the enabling conditions of his integrity as a poet might be sufficient to introduce for an American reader a poetry which, if it shows an interest in religion from the beginning, traverses the tension between two dispensations, a dispensation of an old form of Irish Catholicism unable to meet either the challenges of question or experience, and a new dispensation in the process of being born, and that in a sense is both being received and created in his poetry of the past two decades. I have already mentioned The Book of Hours that is the locus of the goldfinch image. The strong wheeling in the direction of a more obviously religiously inflected poetry, which also betrays Deane’s own confidence in his poetic craft, can be dated earlier than this 2008 collection.
It is evident already in Toccata and Fugue (2000), a title recalling J.S. Bach, a composer often regarded as representing the supreme musical translation of the Protestant inflection of Christianity. One also has to acknowledge the Manhandling of Deity (2003), whose ironic title is intended to suggest that, contrary to our constructions of a judgmental divine that is an idol, the divine discloses itself shyly and slyly as companionable and healing. It seems evident to me, however, that the credentials of these other volumes notwithstanding, the full flowering of Deane’s experimental and theophanic religious poetry occurs in Semibreve (2015) and Naming of the Bones (2021). I think it prudent to concentrate on these two volumes. While convention and Deane’s own narrative practice would dictate that I begin with Semibreve, to give the reader an immediate sense of where Deane has arrived I will begin with Naming of the Bones.
Naming of the Bones (2021)
One could argue that this volume is climactic with regard to Deane’s literary performance of the relation between religion and literature and in particular his enactment of a poetry committed to accessing the sacred lost in an Ireland dominated by a form of Catholicism more than willing to package its divine truths amenable to an Ireland determined by its socially conformist instincts. If the title bears a concrete reference to Christ on Golgotha as the place of bones, and the bones of saints and the dead more generally, it also alludes to what is deepest and the most anatomically important features of a phenomenon that gives itself to the poet and in consequence is worth remembering and celebrating. While Deane remains attentive to phenomena of nature in the gardens and the fields in both their glory and their waste, and is as responsive as ever to the elements of wind, air, and water in all their moods, it is evident that there has been a systemic shift from the kind of response recalling Seamus Heaney in which moments of “lighting” occur but without reference to a transcendent plane, to a response that highlights an opening beyond the world that transforms it, however momentarily, that one finds more nearly illustrated in the dynamically charged theophanies of Gerard Manley Hopkins.
If the focus in this particular book of poems is, as it is in Hopkins’ verse, Christ, what is perhaps different is that there is an equal emphasis on the Holy Spirit, who plays a mediating role between the phenomenon disclosed and the one whose senses are set on fire and made alive. One of the earliest poems in the volume, “By-The-Wind Sailor” attends to what makes experience of Christ, determined by this time after John’s apocalypse to be Alpha and Omega, possible. The epigraph from Psalm 104, “Send forth your spirit and they shall be created and you will renew the face of the earth,” sets the table for this poem and in some sense for the volume as a whole. The poem opens with a reference to Genesis 1 and Ruach over the waters of the deep:
In the beginning, breath agitated like the breeze,
The stitched sheet rippled like a foal, and a home-built
Unsafe’ safe, craft for the now, shivered beyond the stones.
Deane makes clear, as he will throughout this volume, that the phenomenon of phenomena is Christ or, as expressed in this poem (as elsewhere), as Yeshua/Jesus, lest we forget as we have been wont to do the full humanity of Christ. If Christ is a kind of terrible beauty that overwhelms, the Holy Spirit is something of a mystery wrapped in an enigma. Thus, the difficulty of imagining and the need of a multitude of images that cumulatively are more adequate, but even then incapable of locking on fully to what is as real and nebulous as breath. Addressing the Holy Spirit, Deane writes:
You I think of as a bird, of a white so pure you skim
To invisibility; you are the high-pitched buzz.
He slides into another pair of images:
Of the hover-fly, bog cotton in sunlight and a gusting wind,
A wavering of white butterflies struggling towards flight.
He completes this fourth section of the poem by at once remaining concrete by talking about a wind “blowing across the deep,” and introducing the theological trope of creatio ex nihilo, thereby prosecuting another recall of Genesis, as well as its privileged interpretation in the Catholic theological tradition. The testimony to the Spirit is made in full knowledge of the loss of belief that is Ireland’s and Europe’s modern situation and that will likely involve something more than a recycling of old pieties, perhaps a “faith beyond faith” that has abandoned assurance and certitude. In Deane’s painting of a destitute time, he speaks somewhat after the pattern of Heidegger interpreting Friedrich Hölderlin’s great hymns and odes where we discover ourselves “mendicants, loving the absence that will come to save us.” Unlike Heidegger, however, this is the Christian God not only to whom we pray, but who through the Spirit we are enabled to pray. The poems in the collection speak constantly to the magnalia dei. Yet no less than the English Romantics there is equally an experience of spoliation. Deane’s poem “Keel Beach” provides just one of the many examples of his grasp of the latter. Along the tide-line his vision is arrested, his sensibility offended:
Refuse of the ocean: bladderwrack and wing-kelp, toxins
Of human desecration, and there – amongst the cans
And plastics – the rotting carcass, the sodden feathers
Of a gannet.
The severity of the judgment really comes into relief, however, when one becomes aware that in Deane’s figuration it is the gannet rather the dove that is the true emblem of the Spirit. Further, Deane establishes a pattern of association between the degradation of the environment with the equally grievous despoliation of human community caused by the human predilection for war and violence:
. . . Out across the sea, beyond my ken
But within my prayers, sorrows and slaughters of this
Young century: Tikrit, Mosul; the heart is wrenched
By the barbarities.
This volume of poetry also represents an exercise of remembrance of family members now lost, now reduced to bones, including his mother and father, grandparents, his beloved brother Declan, and other denizens of Achill Island where Deane spent his childhood, but also a remembrance of poets such Herbert, Heaney, and Hopkins who, interestingly, are not only recalled for their talent in “allsorts savouring of words”—which has an undeniable Hopkins flavor—but for the fact that they essentially justify being called “saints.” By “saints,” Deane makes clear in “Triple H,” that their words witness to the Word in a mode of self-forgetting and ascesis. Each of these poets—from whom Deane admits drawing—with different inflections signal a “writing outside themselves of themselves inside.” Each made way for what courses through him and escaped his intention, however, conscious and reflective each was about his poetic craft. Deane also wants to remember real saints like Saint Cuthbert and Saint Colman. The lives of both were ascetic beyond imagining, in Cuthbert’s case an exile in a place of remarkable ugliness, in Colman’s case a life of continual danger given the exposure of monasteries to raiders. Yet, for Deane, what specifies both saints is not the embrace of privation, but joy and ecstasy. They endured because they sang of God’s creation and ecstatically waited the embrace of Christ their spouse.
Throughout the volume there is recall of the sometime Edenic life on Achill Island, Deane’s experience of wind, rain, the wildness of the Atlantic, the violent changes in weather and sky, the birds that attempted sanctuary and others that merely visited, and the opening of the eye and the sharpening of the ears for animals and birds, and an appreciation for flora and fauna that not only intimated belonging but demanded that one turn one’s attention towards them. Trees, flowers, and weeds are not nominal entries into a taxonomy. Rather, they are verbal patterns of energy asking to be acknowledged and embraced by a self that transforms in the process. In the case of the dead, memory is an echo of resurrection that allows the formation of the community of the dead and the living that is at once such an Irish ache and a Catholic truth. Then there are two enablers of memory, Christ and, of course, the Holy Spirit. In the title poem, Christ, or more specifically “his distorted body / writhing again in agony,” is the object of our recall. Yet what we recall is a singularity that can take on all our individual and communal pain over history, for as he died in solidarity with us, he joins us precisely in our pain and loss in thanksgiving and Eucharist. The meaning of the Eucharist is that Christ has always remembered us before we remember him.
If Naming of the Bones represents the climactic moment in Deane’s molding of a language to receive the sacred as gift, the sequence of seven poems—listed under the title “Like the Dewfall”—to match Olivier Messiaen’s articulation of amen in Visions of Amen may well be the highest sustained point in all of Deane’s work. Long before this volume Deane had found that for him Messiaen represents the musical equivalent of Hopkins: his music is a music of thanks to the inexhaustible polyphony of nature and our saving reception and embeddedness in it, but also all that frets, suffers, and stuns in our experience and our growing into praise despite our moral outrage and our being shattered.
In this sense, this sequence of poems that concludes the volume also ties together its beginning and end by doubling down on the psalmic register flagged in the beginning. Deane’s individually named poems—each sufficiently verbally complex and multiple to match the complexity of Messiaen’s ingenious musical variety—follows the order of amen of Messiaen’s suite for two pianos, thus in order the amen of creation, stars and planets, agony, desire, birdsong, judgment, and consummation. The poem “Boy-Child” represents the amen of Eden, though an Eden that if largely given is also in a sense gained, since it has to overcome the installation of original sin and guilt that marked Irish education. This obviously autobiographical poem provides a measure for a sensibility that will later be challenged by intellectual complexity, moral ambiguity, sexual desire, and loss of belief. Though the frame is Wordsworthian, the language of the island experience is redolent of Hopkins in the tendency towards alliteration and internal rhyme. The experiences announced in the following passage are concrete:
. . . He tip-toed over
The daffodil innocence of the bog-asphodel, fingered
The white-fluff stuff of bog-cotton turfs.
Nonetheless, there is a kind of intuitive apperception connected to these discrete perceptions:
he sensed himself to be
Cell of the cosmos, fleck on the foam of life.
Corresponding to the amen of stars and planets is “The Monastery.” As in the poetry of Wordsworth and Eliot there are sacred places in our individual and communal memory to which we respond and make us more alive. There he learned
That words could grow, long-stemmed and flaunting,
From the ends of his fingers and form patterns
In a white field.
That was a moment then, there is now the lesson that recollection can draw from it, namely, that you may and perhaps should lose yourself in “richer being.” Yet, this amen has not simply to negotiate the gap between the experience as such and its recollection, after Messiaen’s internally differentiated music; even in plentitude it has to acknowledge loss. The monastery is a ruin, roofless, “stone gnawed.” “The Furies” present Deane’s translation of Messiaen’s amen of agony, in which we experience nature as wild and uncontainable, our souls torn and fraught, and that somehow all suffering is lofted by the Spirit and embraced by an apocalyptic Christ. There are contrapuntal echoes of de Chardin and Hopkins in the appeal, on the one hand, to an “energy / of cosmic force, the source that urges / all creation onwards, outwards, towards / close, omega, the Pleroma” and to “daisy rock” on which we flounder and which illustrate, after the model of “The Wreck of the Deutschland” that
All flesh is flayed by storm, soul is swallowed
In vastness and spat out . . .
“Clarion and Bells” corresponds to Messiaen’s amen of desire, which if it involves a concrete recall of Deane’s painful memory of his inability to render the desire at the heart of Liszt’s Liebesträume when he was a young man at the seminary and alienated from his erstwhile Eden, nonetheless, contains a yes to all longings that cannot be satisfied by anything finite, but only the infinite that is never a possession and which can only be indicated through hyperboles or exclamations. Fittingly, the poem ends with just such an exclamation: “Oh, Christ, my Christ.” Deane’s fifth poem in the sequence is called “The Home Place,” and corresponds to Messiaen’s amen of birdsong, of the saints and angels. It could well be the poem that brings us closest to the music of Messiaen and closer also to the roots of praise, while alluding to those poets (Herbert, Heaney, Hopkins), composers (Bach, Beethoven), and painters (Vermeer) who accompany Deane on his journey towards disclosing the hymn of the universe, its Christological center and pneumatic dynamics and ecstasies. Here are two of the more telling stanzas:
Saints and angels, of all feathers, pass at will
Between time and timelessness; like birds, they
Have their languages and only God can comprehend them all;Between there and here, between then
And now, to signify the end-in-view, Omega, the Christ.
Birdsong and birds, the choiring of saints and angels, rehearse
That purity I strain for, as Messiaen worked
To vocalize the blackbirds, larks, and nightingales, the sounds
He discovered in the veins of the meadows, in the forest bones
“Pont of Pure Truth” corresponds to Messiaen’s sixth amen, the amen of judgment. If the poem does not rise to the heights of the one that preceded it, it is distinguished by a poetic testament that aligns poetry with prophecy and by the renunciation of self-judgment that equally disfigures human beings and the God whom they suppose they worship. “Like the Dewfall” is the seventh and final poem and correlates with Messiaen’s amen of consummation. For Deane the amen of consummation is the perfection of the amen of creation, just as the amen of creation is the anticipation of its blessing in Christ who is the fullness of all reality. The poem is at once intensely personal and general. It opens with a beautiful invocation of Deane’s aunt Maggie who died young:
I stood, smitten and tongue-tied, and held the latch lest it slam
The thick paint-blistered door
between the dim-lit kitchen and the free yard outside
where green slime trailed down
the side of the water-butt. Maggie, too old, still young,
was bent double with arthritis.
If this poem provides an indelible impression of Deane’s early life on Achill island, as the one who remembers and calls to mind, it ends with him as an old man “Brittle-hipped, a little arthritic and taut of hearing,” and seeing himself as one who has travelled on a long journey, now capable of the kind of witness called for and what has all along secretly been his vocation: “Amen, he says, Amen: oh Christ, my Christ, Amen.”
Semibreve (2015)
If there is a recent collection that challenges the excellence—if not necessarily the ambition—of Naming of the Bones, it is Semibreve (2015). Though its merits are too singular to be set aside entirely, nonetheless, in its commitment to poetry as praise, the connection between poetry and music, and its lauding of a Eucharistic Christ that keeps the world from flying apart and who is an augur of peace in our fractious history, linking in one community the living with the beloved and remembered dead, this volume obviously anticipates Naming of the Bones. This volume, which is replete with superb, fully realized, lyric poems, is, as its title suggests, obsessed with music not only in the classical forms in Bach, Brahms, Bruckner, Beethoven, and Dvorak, who are variously recalled, but also in the way music makes its way into language as language struggles towards the condition of music and therein prove capable of rendering the musical accord and rending of the only universe we know. The title poem that opens the collection has at its center a call to “listen.” The scene is set by Deane’s visit to an island chapel, where “in the souring emptiness” of a ruin haunted by ghosts the demand is rung, even if it cannot be verified. Still, though shaken a “tiny chime had happened.” That
was the first semibreve sounded of a gifted music.
I am day and now, listening. Tuned for it, and waiting.
The music that is heard or remembered in these ghastly circumstances is music that belongs to the Church, but the music that makes of the Church a witness to God rather than the kitsch that forces conformity. The religious association cuts even deeper, however, when we recall that the Rule of Saint Benedict opens with the imperative: Listen. Of course, given that a poet deals in images, listening and seeing cannot be separated. This is rendered in very concrete ways in the pair of poems, “Crocus: A Brief History” and “An Elegy.” In the former the visuals of bud (gold dust), tentative opening up (rose color), and full flowering are associated with “prelude,” “overture” and “polyphony” and “oratorio” respectively; in the latter Deane sees music explode from flora on a roadside ditch and suggests itself as a poem that realizes itself in the kinesis of music. In the second stanza he mentions the way Bruckner caught a flight of pelicans in Ecce sacerdos magnus. Yet, the experience can be translated into any breviary of birds whether Messiaen’s or Deane’s own. Why not, the poet says,
a blackcap, fast and furtive, come to feast on the white berries
of the dogwood hedge; bullfinch,
secretive, subdued, flit in a shock of rose-petal black and white
across the alder thicketand I am urged to praise, willing to have the poem
speak the improbable wonderful.
The effect of Hopkins here on the commitment to the irreplaceable particular and the dynamic presentation aided both alliteration and hyphenated words is self-evident. Of course, wonderfully realized as the above poems are, in the amen section that concludes Naming of the Bones Deane provided his overarching statement regarding the intimate relationship between seeing and listening. Nonetheless, in addition to poetic language never being redundant, Semibreve greatly broadens the poet’s sensory vocabulary by adding taste, touch, and smell, and deepens Deane’s argument in the direction that the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar takes in his theological aesthetics both with respect to a general synesthesia and the self-transcending spiritual capacities of the senses. In the poem “Blueberries” taste and touch come together, much as seeing and listening do in other poems.
. . . I am tasting
night and grief in the sweet-bitter flesh
of blueberries, coating tongue and lips with juicethat this my kiss across unconscionable distance
touch to your lips with the fullness of our loving.
Though the poem makes clear that the intended object of the kiss that unites tasting and touching is Deane’s wife, the kiss with its tasting and touching is also a religious trope since early Christian readings of the Song of Songs, the most erotic of recitals of which is to be found in Bernard of Clairvaux’s renderings in which the chastity of allegorical interpretation fails to overrule the eros that is God’s rule for us. Smell also reminds us of theophany, indeed, remands us to it. In the thoroughly unpretentious poem, “Showers,” Deane lays out a common experience still able to evoke a transcendent referent:
By the fragrance of rain over-leaf-mould, by the green
Darkness that held you, and the world out there so all
Riven with grandeur and greyness that the drip drip dripOn your unprotected shoulder was the tap tap tap of someone
Reminding you.
Interestingly in this passage that involves both citation of Hopkins and the courage to privilege onomatopoeia, the someone remains unnamed and essentially unnamable.
Semibreve is distinguished not only by its commitment to music, but, arguably, here more acutely than anywhere else in his poetic canon Deane broaches the issue of the relationship between poetry and prayer that the French phenomenologist, Jean-Louis Chrétien, referred to as “wounded praise.” Prayer is everywhere in Semibreve, either as an explicit theme (“Night Prayer”) or as the prayer of the Psalms presented to remind or warn us, but in any event to have shaping power with respect to our lives (“Walls”). The Psalms provide a privileged form of speech that allow us to negotiate a loss of meaning and to witness a God who, if he appears to be absent, is Emmanuel and thus abides with us. For this reason, the Psalms are no less prophetic than Isaiah, Jeremiah, or Ezekiel. Still, for Deane, as the cluster of poems, “Lydia,” that closes the volume, illustrates, all of scripture, both Old and New Testament, whether its literary form is chronicle, myth, legal script, legend, epistle, or realistic narrative, is prophetic and proposes a challenge to the believer to rise to its searing wisdom and a demand to poetry to find a model for the venture of language that would disclose, heal, allow us to see and to praise.
It will not surprise for a poet steeped in Hopkins and Heaney and friendly if slightly suspicious of the Romantics that Deane responds to nature as sacrament. The most glowing example of this is the poem “Muir Woods” which takes Deane away from his island home and the gnarled and knotted but measurable landscapes of Ireland for the giant redwoods “steeple-tall” of California. There is a moment, a spot in time, of revelation when “the rain’s soft sibilance holding all the woods / in an embrace of stillness” provokes awe and reverence. Almost as if we have ventured into Tolkien landscape the redwoods have their language that heals the illnesses of mankind, a healing power that is doubled with the “roe-deer skittering / across our path.” We come to know,
we have dipped our fingers in a sacred font
and emerge fortified by sacrament, blessed again in spirit
for our ongoing struggle with the flesh.
In Semibreve, no less than in Naming of the Bones, Deane refuses the typical Romantic move of generalizing sacrament into signatures of a transcendence not otherwise specified and that can vaguely be associated with the Spirit that seems too indistinct between the human and the divine. Though the language of spirit is not entirely absent from this volume, we know from Naming of the Bones that Deane braves identifying it with the divine person of the Holy Spirit. Here the issue is whether sacrament is tied to Christ in the manner of Hopkins or functions more or less as a free radical after the manner of Wordsworth and Shelley. In “Mount Hermon” the connection between Eucharist and poetry is explicitly spelled out:
We said the name
Yeshua, Yeshua, shared wine and breads and oil, spoke of himIn sacrament and sharing. Word. Entire. Yeshua calling us
By name. I spoke a psalm, language but no words, within me.
We are witnesses to wonders and we have news to tell.
The God of our reverence and our witness is the God superlatively with us. Immanence is not incompatible with divine transcendence. Rather it is the guarantee that transcendence is real because encompassing of beyond and below, here and there. Our God is not the “High God” if by this God we mean the inaccessible God who has nothing to do with our material and sensuous world. Of course, this God was always a fiction and our allegiance to this God has fermented—if not fomented—his death. Our God, the God of poets is
goldcrest, flitting in the berberis
for a feast of insect while snow
flurries down through a wash of sunlight this out-of-season
Easter week. God
Is not not, unchanging, unbegotten, ineffable, God is is.
The triumphant affirmation of God’s reality depends rendering Is verbally rather than nominally. However useful the predicates that we have used with respect to God for particular purposes, we have to be aware that we might be setting up a quarantined transcendent who is entirely indifferent to the world. And such could not be further from the truth of Christianity and Catholicism as the witness to this truth. God is to be found in the pink rose, blackberries “plashing purple kisses on my lips” and in Deane’s and your memory of the beloved dead enabled by Christ and remembered far more passionately and thoroughly than remembered by us left behind, however committed our efforts to remember and however heroic our stance.
Venturing
If Selected and New Poems (2023) is anything to go by, then not only has there not been a slowing down of literary production, but something marvelously in line with the acceleration that is visible over the past two decades. There are a considerable number of new poems, almost all of which are the level of excellence that Naming of the Bones and Semibreve have shaped us to expect. The venture is the same, that is, to praise. This is best captured in “The World is Charged,” a poem that represents not only an homage to the theme of “grandeur” that is Hopkins’ own, but also sprinkled with epiphanies, and an ending that directs all epiphany (and loss) to the Lord who guards over the giving and the one to whom phenomenal reality is released.
The poems that go provisionally under the title For the Times and Seasons are not only packed with epiphanies, whether of birds and animals, but one finds here more conspicuously the markings of epiphany by the adverb “suddenly” and the adjective “sudden.” The markings do belong to a Romantic code, but they reach back to the very beginning of reflection on beauty as Plato and after him Plotinus struggle for a language to render the shock and stun of beauty. Of course, music has much to do with epiphany and theophany and the praise that is ordered to it.
For Deane, Messiaen continues to be unforgettable, as does de Chardin, since in poem after poem the gravitational point of all appearance, of pain and loss, as well as glory, is Christ, and it is the Spirit who is the medium of the ordering of all happening and all memory to him, whose name is Yeshua, the first syllable of which sounds “yes.”
