Dear Pilgrims E-Book

John F. Deane

• Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 78

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

With 'Crocus: a brief history', John F. Deane sets his Dear Pilgrims in motion, a series of brief histories of time, a time that is rich in incident and in redemption. In a decisively secular age, Deane's is a poetry of Christian belief. It explores renewal, alive with and to the kinds of witness he has learned from George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins and R.S. Thomas. His 'I', like theirs, makes space for a reluctant 'us'. Dear Pilgrims includes actual pilgrimages. 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. He vividly adapts the Middle English poem Pearl and realises it for our time. He is also a master of the sonnet as an instrument of love, doubt and faith. The poet's voice, perhaps because of the timeless wisdom it carries, is vital and contemporary. It is no surprise that the founder of Poetry Ireland and Dedalus Press is a poet of wide reading and vision. The clarity of his verse and purpose makes his voice unique. Rowan Williams celebrates his 'Music, a stony, damp and deeply alive landscape (both Ireland and the Holy Land), a passionate and searching engagement with God'.

Leseprobe

JOHN F. DEANE

Dear Pilgrims

for Thomas Leonard, and for his parents Mary and Nicholas and i.m. Peter Leonard

Crocus: A Brief History

The crocus opens out to something

more than crocus, becomes a brief history

of time, the ology of cosmos, as a poem is –

impacted yellow of gold-dust, shape

of a baby-thumb all-tentative, prelude to a new year;

breath of fire from the dark earth, from the closed heart;

the rose-coloured: flush of love,

signature of the overture: – these sudden, these small

preliminaries – polyphony of crocus – demi-semi-quavers

of what will be an oratorio

of hollyhock, lupin, sunflower,

under the gold-full baton of the light.

for Thomas Leonard

Contents

Title PageDedicationCrocus: A Brief HistoryNot TitledAn ElegyEpithalamiumFirst TestamentBrief History of a LifeA Mercian HymnOld BurningbushThe Distant HillsRainbowGo Down, JonahClassical PurpleGoldcrestInnocenceA Small SalvationThe Upright PianoThe Ruined MeadowDawn to DuskTreasuresFirst LightParlement of FoulesIsland of SaintsCoastBest WesternEucalyptusHungerA New TestamentTownlandThe Whole World OverDark MotherVisitationBloodPulseThe Side-AisleThe Wall-ClockThe Downs, The CedarsLetter from East AngliaAccording to LydiaCock-CrowBedrockThe BindingKfar NahumDisturbancesThe FloweringDemonsTableSamariaPapyrusMediterraneanThe GardenThe ViewingHill of SkullsSunriseThe TurningLydiaViolin ConcertoConstellationsA MosaicLike Shooting StarsTesseraeAs the Stars of HeavenThe World is ChargedFly-TyingThe Village SchoolroomThe TurningThe World is ChargedThe Great FireSoulHerbert Lomas (1924–2011)CadenzaIn the DarkThe Spoiling FruitPearlPearlAcknowledgementsAbout the AuthorAlso by John F. Deane from Carcanet PressCopyright

Not Titled

Reynolds, staunch Sagittarian,

aimed always high, both barrels of his shotgun

screwed to the dark shape

in the topmost branches of the dawdling sycamore;

and he, Mister H, was truthful when he said

that he was steeped, steeped, steeped

in luck, though I’d say graced

with sequoia-growth of talent. One shoe

dangling

brought Reynolds to a halt :

yet it is again dark-green wreathe-time

in our world, threaded holly branches with their blood-berries,

pine-cones,

that nature’s baby Reynolds knitted fast

with his knuckled fingers and thumbs

out of an overburdening love.

An Elegy

Flora in the roadside ditch

are boasting the water-colour purple of a pride of bishops –

vetch, knapweed, clover and the rosebay willow herb;

and I would make a poem

the way old Bruckner caught a flight of pelicans in his

Ecce sacerdos magnus…

for eight-part choir, key magenta, though these times the spirit

slumps, mal tended in this limping country. Now

a blackcap, fast and furtive, comes 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 thicket

and I am urged to praise, willing to have the poem

speak the improbable wonderful. Today

the poet Seamus Heaney said he was leaving us for a while,

visiting high mountain pastures,

and seeing things.

I have been walking, grieved, the Slievemore heathlands

and watching a sheep-dog,

low-crouched, eager, waiting for the sheepman’s whistle;

furze blazed with a cool gold flame; the sheep

were marked with blobs of red and purple dye, cumbered

with dried-in mud; while out on the bay

the Crested Grebe moved, masterful, in brown Connemara tweed.

Epithalamium

for Mary and Nicholas

I see you, stilled, attentive, in arrivals hall, love, yet tentative,

somewhere in the air;

I wished, back then, when the white beauty of the frosted earth

was powering the crocus, hyacinth, and daffodil,

that the most perfect snowflakes fall like kisses on your cheeks;

I prayed that –

to the questions you would need to ask – the answers might always be

the loveliness and wonder

of creation. Hold, then, to astonishment, to the ongoing mystery

of one another, the burgeoning familiar;

we have come to understand that when the singing ends

the song continues,

when the poem is written at last, the poetry begins, we have learned

that patience is difficult at the threshold

and in the forecourt of the heart. Be aware of the possibility of grief

and of the conceivable presence of the angel.

I see you, stilled, attentive, at the altar steps,

the bright loveliness of beginnings like a veil about you,

the hearts and prayers of a community

behind you, and this we pray to the God of sacrament :

that she may grace you both to be

magnificent together, magnificent to one another, magnificent

through the bountiful flight ahead.

We wish you music, the slow, classical dance

of what is past and yet to come, the heady beat

of the fleeting present; we wish you sunlight, the reach and sounding

of the waters about Keem Bay,

the gentle breathing of the Atlantic; that all weathers be a force about you,

keeping you faithful to the fluency of symphony.

I see you, stilled, attentive, in the bright dawn, love urging the grace

of a sure journey upon you, your destination

a better world, of love and mercy, of justice, happiness and peace.

FIRST TESTAMENT

Brief History of a Life

It is morning again in the old grey house.

Silence along the skirting-boards. Stillness

in the hall. Spirit-light. The boy-ghost

sits sullen, in pyjamas, top of the stairs,

fourteen steps down – where the carpet is frayed

and cobwebs frame the banisters; decades

down, metronome tock-tocks, and step, step, and step,

piano, the Moonlight Sonata, time! – faster soon:

Rondo a la Turka, allegro please – and now

that the walls and stairs have all dissolved, he still

sits, angry at the wet sheets, the dark, the unmanifested,

how the echoes of the 9th symphony’s final chords

hang on the air before the thunder breaks.

And again it is morning in the old grey house…

A Mercian Hymn

from the Anglo-Saxon

                              Isaiah: Ezechias’ Song

I said – now in my twilight years I will go down

to the roots of Sheol, and seek what is left to crown

the rest of my days. I will not find, I said, my Lord God

amongst the living. Nor will I look abroad

to any of the inhabitants of earth. My time

is lost to me. It has been stolen with my name

and folded away like a shepherd’s tent. My life

has been snipped in pieces, as if a weaver’s knife

had sliced it; and even then, still in my prime, I knew

misfortune. From dawn to dusk it is you

who have been completing me, from evening through

to dawn, like lions’ teeth you have rushed to harrow

all my bones; from dawn to dusk it is you

who have been completing me.

                                           As a fledgling swallow

so will I cry to you; I sit and meditate on your words

like a dove. I have gazed so long heavenwards

my eyes have grown bleary; o Lord my Lord, see!

I am the butt of animosity, speak up for me,

when my words fail will you then answer as a lover

since you yourself are the cause? I will pick over

all my years in the bitterness of my soul.

                                                               O Lord my Lord,

if life must take such a heavy toll, or if the onward

journey of my spirit must suffer always a new

warfare, it is you who must uplift me, it is you

who must give me life. See, in moments of peace

I find most bitterness, but you, o you, come to release

my soul that I may not perish. For you have thrown

all my sins behind your back. Hell on its own

will not confess to you, nor death praise you; those

who descend into the pit do not search its alleyways

for mercy. The living, it is the living rather

who will confess you, as I do this very day. The father

will make the truth clear to his children.

                                                                  O Lord my Lord,

keep us safe; and we shall sing our poems to the Lord

all the days of our life in the very house of the Lord.

Old Burningbush

I tramped the loose-stone cart-track into peatlands;

mist was hanging on the looped sienna hills,

clouds trailed, like smoke, along the mountain

and sunlight shifted in swathes across the lower slopes.

I find sustenance here, in cello-music rising to me

from the valley, falsetto notes of high-range skylarks

accompanying. For this is Achill Island. On Keem beach

a mountain stream carves out a miniature grand canyon

through the sand, yet all the world – in my green morning –

was accusation and the response was guilt – Yahweh

dragging me this way by the right arm and Yahweh

dragging me that way by the left, old Burningbush,