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- Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
John F. Deane opted for a Selected and New rather than the tombstone of a Collected to mark his eightieth year before heaven. He is still a living force, in physical and spiritual space: a Selected Poems (Snow Falling on Chestnut Hill, 2012) already exists. With substantial new work to share, it seemed timely to produce an essential volume, with compelling new work added to underline his witness. Deane's poems explore the beauty of the island where he was born, on the west coast of Ireland, and the wonders of natural creation everywhere. His imagination is most at home in rural Ireland, where the long centuries of scholarship and faith have retained their focus and shape. Music is present everywhere in his selection, in the poems' lyricism and in their reference to composers and compositions, particularly Beethoven and Olivier Messiaen. The poems move from a childhood encounter with a basking shark off his Achill Island home, to an elderly gentleman climbing the stairs to bed. A love of the landscape of his home island is developed in poems that combine an awareness of beauty and fragility with the spiritual significance the physical world offers those who are open to it. A 'rewilding' of old certainties of faith and worship, a movement through the gifts of spirit and Spirit occur. A new sequence, 'For the Times and Seasons', completes this generous celebration of a long life spent, and still spending, in poetry and faith.
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Selected and New Poems
John F. Deane
CARCANET POETRY
Poems: Selected & New
Under the trees the fireflies
zip and go out, like galaxies;
our best poems, reaching in from the periphery,
are love poems, achieving calm.
On the road, the cries of a broken rabbit
were pitched high in their unknowing;
our vehicles grind the creatures down
till the child’s tears are for all of us,
dearly beloved, ageing into pain,
and for herself, for what she has discovered
early, beyond this world’s loveliness. Always
after the agitated moments, the search for calm.
Curlews scatter now on a winter field, their calls
small alleluias of survival; I offer you
poems, here where there is suffering and joy,
evening, and morning, the first day.
This gathering of work, selected and new, is dedicated to Ursula
Contents
Selected and New Poems
Basking Shark: Achill Island
Where bogland hillocks hid a lake
we placed a tom-cat on a raft; our guns
clawed pellets in his flesh until, his back
arched, the pink tongue bitten through, he drowned.
We fished for gulls with hooks we’d hide
in bread and when they swallowed whole we’d pull;
screaming they sheared like kites above a wild
sea; twine broke and we forgot. Until
that day we swam where a great shark
glided past, dark and silent power
half-hidden through swollen water; stunned
we didn’t shy one stone. Where seas lie calm
dive deep below the surface; silence there
pounds like panic and moist fingers touch.
Island Woman
It wasn’t just the building of a bridge,
for even before, they had gone by sea
to Westport and from there abroad, and each
child sent money home till death in the family
brought him, reluctant, back. Of course the island
grew rich and hard, looked, they say, like Cleveland.
On a bridge the traffic moves both ways.
My own sons went and came, their sons, and theirs;
each time, in the empty dawn, I used to pray
and I still do, for mothers. I was there
when the last great eagle fell in a ditch.
My breasts are warts. I never crossed the bridge.
Gallarus
No gilded tabernacle here, staunch
in authority; the walls house gloom.
Who has set the sun in the heavens has withdrawn
into thick darkness. These stones are cold,
bones on a winter shore that have lost
a soul. Silence only. Heaven
and the highest heavens don’t contain him
and will this tent once built by bones?
Beyond, the ocean grinds the old
questions, decay and resurrection,
and warm blood. Do I find answers
here? stone-cold inside this skull.
Penance
They leave their shoes, like signatures, below;
above, their God is waiting. Slowly they rise
along the mountainside where rains and winds go
hissing, slithering across. They are hauling up
the bits and pieces of their lives, infractions
of the petty laws, the little trespasses and
sad transgressions. But this bulked mountain
is not disturbed by their passing, by this mere
trafficking of shale, shifting of its smaller stones.
When they come down, feet blistered and sins
fretted away, their guilt remains and that black
mountain stands against darkness above them.
On a Dark Night
On a dark night
When all the street was hushed, you crept
Out of our bed and down the carpeted stair.
I stirred, unknowing that some light
Within you had gone out, and still I slept.
As if, out of the dark air
Of night, some call
Drew you, you moved in the silent street
Where cars were white with frost. Beyond the gate
You were your shadow on a garage-wall.
Mud on our laneway touched your naked feet.
The dying elms of our estate
Became your bower
And on your neck the chilling airs
Moved freely. I was not there when you kept
Such a hopeless tryst. At this most silent hour
You walked distracted with your heavy cares
On a dark night while I slept.
Winter in Meath
i.m. Tomas Tranströmer
Again we have been surprised
deprived, as if suddenly,
of the earth’s familiarity
it is like the snatching away of love
making you aware at last you loved
sorrows force their way in, and pain
like memories half contained
the small birds, testing boldness, leave
delicate tracks
closer
to the back door
while the cherry flaunts blossoms of frost
and stands in desperate isolation
∼
the base of the hedgerow is a cliff of snow
the field is a still of a choppy sea
white waves capped in a green spray
a grave was dug into that hard soil
and overnight the mound of earth
grew stiff and white as stones flung onto a beach
our midday ceremony was hurried, forced
hyacinths and holly wreaths dream birds
appearing on our horizonless ocean
∼
the body sank slowly
the sea closed over
things on the seabed stirred
again in expectation
∼
this is a terrible desolation
the word ‘forever’
stilling all the air
to glass
∼
night tosses and seethes;
mind and body chafed all day
as a mussel-boat restlessly irritates
the mooring
on estuary water a fisherman
drags a long rake against the tide; one
snap of a rope and boat and this
solitary man
sweep off together into night
perhaps the light from my window
will register a moment with some god
riding by on infrangible glory
∼
at dawn
names of the dead
appear on the pane
beautiful
in undecipherable frost
breath
hurts them
and they fade
∼
the sea has gone grey as the sky
and as violent
pier and jetty go under
again and again
as a people suffering losses
a flock of teal from the world’s edge
moves low over the water
finding grip for their wings along the wind
already among stones
a man
like a priest
stooping in black clothes
has begun beachcombing
the dead, gone silent in their graves
have learned the truth about resurrection
∼
you can almost look into the sun
silver in the silver-blue monstrance
cold over the barren white cloth of the world
for nothing happens
each day is an endless waiting
for the freezing endlessness of the dark
once – as if you had come across
a photograph, or a scarf maybe – a silver
monoplane like a knife-blade cut
across the still and haughty sky
but the sky healed up again after the passing that left
only a faint, pink thread, like a scar
Francis of Assisi 1182 : 1982
Summer has settled in again; ships,
softened to clouds, hang on the horizon;
buttercups, like bubbles, float
on fields of a silver-grey haze; and words
recur, such as light, the sea, and God
the frenzy of crowds jostling towards the sun
contains silence, as eyes contain
blindness; we say, may the Lord
turning his face towards you
give you peace
morning and afternoon the cars moved out
onto the beach and clustered, shimmering,
as silver herring do in a raised net; this
is a raucous canticle to the sun
altissimu, omnipotente, bon Signore
to set up flesh
in images of snow and of white
roses, to preach to the sea
on silence, to man
on love, is to strain towards death
as towards a body without flaw
our poems, too, are gestures of a faith
that words of an undying love
may not be without some substance
words hovered like larks above his head, dropped
like blood from his ruptured hands
tue so’le laude, et onne benedictione
we play, like children, awed and hesitant
at the ocean’s edge;
between dusk and dark the sea
as if it were God’s long and reaching fingers
appropriates each footprint from the sand
I write down words, such as light, the sea, and God
and a bell rides out across the fields
like a man on a horse with helmet and lance
gesturing foolishly towards night
laudato si, Signore, per sora nostra
morte corporale
at night, the cars project
ballets of brightness and shadow on the trees
and pass, pursuing
darkness at the end of their tunnels of light
the restful voices have been swept by time
beyond that storybook night sky
where silence
drowns them out totally
On Strand Road
for Seamus Heaney
Waves have been sweeping in over the sandflats
under a chilling breeze; there is a man
windsurfing, stooping like a steeplejack
into his task; the summer girls who ran
with long gandering strides over the sand
are ghosts within a book. The poet’s window
looks out across the sea towards England
and the cold north; like his bird he has grown
fabulous, comes down at times to touch
the range wall for conviction. The man on the sea
relishes each crest and hollow, and each
bow bend starts out on another journey.
Ghost
I sat where she had sat
in the fireside chair
expecting her to come down the stairs
into the kitchen;
the door was open, welcoming,
coals shifted in the Rayburn,
a kettle hummed;
she heard the susurrations of the fridge.
She had surrounded herself with photographs,
old calendars, hand-coloured picture-postcards;
sometimes a robin looked in at her from the world
or a dog barked vacantly from the hill;
widowed she sat, in the fireside chair,
leaning into a populated past;
she sat so quietly, expecting ghosts,
that a grey mouse moved by, uncurious,
till she stomped her foot against the floor;
and did she sense, I wondered, the ghost
who would come after her death to sit
where she had sat, in the fireside chair?
Artist
This was the given image –
a moulded man-body
elongated into pain, the head
sunk in abandonment: the cross.
I see it now
as the ultimate in ecstasy,
attention focused, the final words
rehearsed; there are black
nail-heads and contrasting
plashes of blood
like painter’s oils: self-portrait
with grief and darkening sky;
something like Hopkins,
our intent, depressive scholar
who gnawed on the knuckle-bones of words
for sustenance – because God
scorched his bones with nearness
so that he cried with a loud voice
out of the entangling, thorny
underbrush of language.
Christ, with Urban Fox
I
He was always there for our obeisance,
simple, ridiculous,
not sly, not fox, up-front – whatever,
man-God, God-man, Christ – but there.
Dreadlocks almost, and girlish, a beard
trim in fashion, his feminine
fingers pointing to a perfect
heart chained round with thorns;
his closed and slim-fine lips
inveigling us towards pain.
II
Did he know his future? while his blood
slicked hotly down the timbers did he know
the great hasped rock of the tomb
would open easily as a book of poems
breathing the words out? If he knew
then his affliction is charade, as is our hope;
if he was ignorant – his mind, like ours,
vibrating with upset – then his embrace of pain
is foolishness beyond thought, and there –
where we follow, clutching to the texts –
rests our trust, silent, wide-eyed, appalled.
III
I heard my child scream out
in pain on her hospital bed,
her eyes towards me where I stood
clenched in my distress;
starched sheets, night-lights, night-fevers,
soft wistful cries of pain,
long tunnel corridors down which flesh
lies livid against the bone.
IV
Look at him now, this king of beasts, grown
secretive before our bully-boy modernity,
master-shadow among night-shadows,
skulking through our wastes. I watched a fox
being tossed under car wheels, thrown like dust
and rising out of dust, howling in its agony;
this is not praise, it is obedience,
the way the moon suffers its existence,
the sky its seasons. Man-God, God-man, Christ,
suburban scavenger – he has danced
the awful dance, the blood-jig, has been strung
up as warning to us all, his snout
nudging still at the roots of intellect.
The Fox-God
Across the fields and ditches, across the unbridgeable
mean width of darkness, a fox barked out its agony;
all night it fretted, whimpering like a famished child,
and the rain fell without pity; it chewed at its flesh,
gnawed on its bared bone, until, near dawn, it died.
The fox, they will say, is vermin, and its god
a vermin god, it will not know, poor creature,
how it is suffering – it is yourself you grieve for.
While I, being still a lover of angels, demanding
a Jacob’s ladder beyond our fields, breathed
may El Shaddai console you into that darkness.
I know there was no consolation. No fox-god came.
But at dawn, man the enemy came, stalking fields,
snares in his bag, a shotgun cocked. Poor
creatures. The gap out of life, we have learned,
is fenced over with affliction. We, too, some dusk,
will take a stone for pillow, we will lie down, snared,
on the uncaring earth. Poor creatures. Poor creatures.
Father
‘This is the way towards kindness’
he said, ‘believe me’, and I did;
I saw the small brown flecks of wisdom
like rust-drops on his hands;
six blind, sleek, mewling kittens
birth-wet and innocent of claw
he gathered into a hessian bag
with stones for travelling companions
and swung and swung it through the blue air
and out into the waters of the lake.
Sometimes still I see them scrabbling,
their snout-heads raised, their bodies
nude and shivering in an alien element,
sometimes – when I see the children,
their big, wide-open eyes unseeing,
skin stretched dry and crinkling
like leather and above them the blue sky,
that enviable sun shining – again I hear
‘this is the way towards kindness,
believe me’ and I do, I do, I do.
Silence
I was watching for the flight past
of a comet that would not pass again
for over a thousand years; I saw
only the stars and once the steady
unremarkable progress of some
man-made scrap-heap drifting across the sky;
but I was satisfied, awed once more
by the unaccountable night.
Somewhere in earth-darkness a dog
barked and fell silent. I inhaled
stars and quiet and my own minuscule standing
on the rim of the world, how the silence
that stretched before the music of the spheres
would have been an orchestra tuning up,
a strife of instruments before the symphony’s great
knock-on-the-door, or how the prolonged
vegetable and animal quiet utterly failed
when a human voice screamed from behind a hill.
