Snow Falling on Chestnut Hill E-Book

John F. Deane

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

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

John F. Deane is a vital and generous presence in Irish poetry. New and Selected Poems gathers work from Deane's five previous Carcanet collections, alongside a new sequence, Snow Falling on Chestnut Hill. Written with an inquiring intelligence, these poems of a dozen years meditate on the relevance of Christian spirituality to our troubled times. Each of the twelve poems in the title sequence presents a movement of the spirit, from the author's childhood in the west of Ireland, through the death of a wife, to the birth of a grandchild. Arranged in the manner of an orchestral symphony, each section takes its cue from a different piece of music, from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony to Mozart's Laudate Dominum. The sequence traces, phase by phase, the development of a Christian life. Faith, in its broadest sense, is inflected by imagination.

Leseprobe

JOHN F. DEANE

Snow Falling on Chestnut Hill New and Selected Poems

Acknowledgements

Parts of some of the pieces in Snow Falling on Chestnut Hill have appeared in PN Review, Agenda Magazine, Salamander (USA), The Poetry Ireland Review, Irish Pages, The Stinging Fly, Southword, Image (USA), Consequence (USA; ed. George Kovach), Voices at the World’s Edge (ed. Paddy Bushe; Dedalus, 2010). Parts were read on the RTÉ Radio programme Sunday Miscellany.

Contents

Title Page

Acknowledgements

SELECTED POEMS

from Toccata and Fugue (2000)

In Dedication

Penance

Winter in Meath

Ghost

Artist

Christ with Urban Fox

The Fox-God

The Taking of the Lambs

Fugue

from Manhandling the Deity (2003)

Officium

Frenzy

Nightwatch

Matrix

The Book of Love

House Martins

Acolyte

Fantasy in White

The Apotheosis of Desire

Canticle

from The Instruments of Art (2005)

Late October Evening

The Gift

The Meadows of Asphodel

Adagio Molto

The Instruments of Art

The Study

You

Carnival of the Animals

Report from a Far Place

The Red Gate

The Chaplet

from A Little Book of Hours (2008)

To Market, to Market

Call Me Beautiful

Towards a Conversion

Harbour, Achill Island

Mapping the Sky

The Poem of the Goldfinch

Kane’s Lane

Stranger

Madonna and Child

Triduum

from Eye of the Hare (2011)

Travelling Man

Shelf Life

The Marble Rail

On the Edge

Eye of the Hare

Cedar

Abundance

The Colours

The Colliery

Words of the Unknown Soldier

Shoemaker

Sheets

Bikes

Ever This Night

Footfalls

Midsummer Poem

Mimizan Plage

Snow Falling on Chestnut Hill (2012)

Overture

Traveller

Who have Business with the Sea

Bead after Bead

Writing out the Myth

Pastoral Symphony

As Breath against the Windowpane

Night on Skellig Michael

Mother and Child

An Eldering Congregation

Snow Falling on Chestnut Hill

Coda

About the Author

Also by John F. Deane from Carcanet Press

Copyright

SELECTED POEMS

from Toccata and Fugue (2000)

(2000)

In Dedication

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.

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.

Winter in Meath

To 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 wreathes 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 its 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.

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.