Poetry review: Poems where the seemingly mundane can reveal itself as spiritually radiant

'Jonah and Me' is a chance for readers to sit with poet John F Deane as he reflects on an immense career, a life lived in service of his art and his faith

• Jonah and Me 
• John F Deane 
• Carcanet, €12.99

John F Deane has never been afraid to mark himself as an artist out of his time. 

It’d be fair to say that religious poetry is not having a moment right now but Deane is one of the very, very few living poets whose work has remained self-consciously mystical and Christian across the decades.

His latest collection, Jonah and Me, sees him play all the hits. We’re presented with poems that attempt to find God in nature, where the seemingly mundane can reveal itself as spiritually radiant. 

As with much of Deane’s previous work, the influences of Hopkins, Kavanagh, and Dylan Thomas are clearly visible here.

In the poem Presences, a simple walk on the beach is transformed into a mediation on our relationship with the dead: 

“I am scavenging/ on the beach…I choose/ a rounded umber-coloured stone and marvel at its guardianship of such millennia…Yet we cherish memories of those/ whom we have loved, strong essences the dead /bequeath to us”. 

This is classic Deane. The dead are all around us because they never really leave — gentle, if sometimes melancholic, presences. 

We see this again and again in Jonah and Me. House of cards, for example, opens with “The dead are gathering again round the parlour table” while in the opening line of As One we are reminded that not only are the dead ever-present, we will all one day join them: “We are carrying our death about with us”. 

The voice in these poems is one who doesn’t despair in the face of death — it’s simply another of life’s strange burdens, something that unites us: “we, hurting, cry out/ as one, in the woodshed, the cow byre, in the high/ -rise office of the city”.

While the big questions of existence, death and God are frequently asked in this collection, answers are never sought with determination. 

That’s not the point. For the most part these are life-affirming poems that seek not to explain the universe but, rather, to draw attention to its beauty, to bear witness to the mysteries of the world, the human soul. 

Again, in the poem Presences he concludes: “Nor do I stand alone, the mountains/ rising behind me, the sea stretching to dim horizons”.

Deane is an outstanding poet and an artist of deep integrity but in reading and re-reading this collection, a contradiction emerges. 

His mystic imagination, lyricism, and classical craftsmanship are what give his poems a timeless quality but this same unyielding commitment, this refusal to bend his art to a changing world in crisis can make it feel a little disconnected from the 21st century. 

When Deane stands at the sea’s edge contemplating God, other artists are concerned with the impact of catastrophic climate change on those same seas, the rise of the far-right, the erosion of our democracies, genocide in Gaza — take your pick.

As founder of Poetry Ireland Review, the National Poetry Society, and Dedalus Press, John F Deane has had a huge influence on the Irish Literary landscape. 

Jonah and Me is a chance for readers to sit with him as he reflects on an immense career, a life lived in service of his art and his faith. 

In At Sea we are offered a childhood memory: “a summer day on Dooega Beach, granny/ in black, sitting, pensive, on a grey-dark rock/ and watching as my favourite red ball/ went bobboling away on the withdrawing tide”. 

He concludes the poem by asking “why this remembering now, why now?”. Deane frequently questions his life and work in this way in Jonah and Me but, of course, he knows as well as we do that these beautiful, meditative poems are their own justification.