Dear Pilgrims

Deane John F.

John F. Deane's poetry of Christian belief in a decisively secular age explores how redemption and renewal might emerge. He writes in the sincere, troubled, wide-awake tradition of Gerard Manley Hopkins and R. S. Thomas. Like theirs, his concerns are contemporary, his "I" speaks for a reluctant "us".

"Dear Pilgrims" describes actual pilgrimages as the poet moves through England (East Anglia in particular), Israel and Palestine, disclosing a "new testament" that revisions the Christian faith through the eyes of an unknown female disciple of Christ, one of Christ's contemporaries, examining in detail the demanding beauty of the natural world and its relationship to a transcendent reality. Elsewhere he develops an adaptation of the Middle English poem "Pearl", and offers a sequence of sonnets, "According to Lydia", that presents a challenging view of Christ, a kind of fifth Gospel.

Beginning with familiar Christian imagery and themes, Deane finds a contemporary voice for a renewed faith and a new poetics. It is no surprise that the founder of "Poetry Ireland" and the Dedalus Press should be a poet of wide reading and vision, and his own work decisively resonates.

About the Author

John F. Deane was born on Achill Island in 1943. He founded Poetry Ireland – the National Poetry Society – and "The Poetry Ireland Review" in 1978, and is the founder of The Dedalus Press, of which he was editor from 1985 until 2006. In 2008 he was visiting scholar in the Burns Library of Boston College. John F. Deane's poetry has been translated and published in France, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Romania, Italy, Slovakia, Sweden and other countries. His poems in Italian won the 2002 Premio Internazionale di Poesia Citta di Marineo. His fiction has been published by Blackstaff Press in Befast; his most recent novel "Where No Storms Come" was published by Blackstaff in 2011. He is the recipient of the O'Shaughnessy Award for Irish Poetry and the Marten Toonder Award for Literature. John F. Deane is a member of Aosdana, the body established by the Arts Council to honour artists "whose work had made an outstanding contribution to the arts in Ireland". His poetry has been shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award and the T. S. Eliot Prize. In 1996 Deane was elected Secretary-General of the European Academy of Poetry. In 2007 he was made Chevalier en l'ordre des arts et des lettres by the French government. He is currently the editor of Poetry Ireland Review.

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