Jonah and Me,
by John F. Deane
(Carcanet Press, £12.99 / €16.99)
John F. Deane is a poet who continues to bewilder us with the sheer skill of his late creativity. Like W.B. Yeats, and another more famous Person, he has kept the best wines until the late hour. This new collection comes with high praise from across the Irish Sea; an endorsement from Rowan Williams and an impressive Recommendation from the Poetry Book Society.
Jonah and Me is a fabled work, its references and touchstones still attached to the Achill island patrimony of flora and fauna and fathers. “Franciscan Monastery, Achill Island” is just one masterpiece within the book:
“be watchful for the skylarks, for peace upon the world,
searching for ways to help repair God’s tumbledown house,
and then, when you come back, at noon, you will find
peace, and silence, ocean distantly breathing…”
Faith
This poem was written to celebrate the bicentennial of the Franciscans, a brotherhood that had opened a monastery and school on the poet’s native island. It is just one of a number of highly worked and deeply meditated texts that Deane has created out of his attachment to the Catholic faith and his knowledge of the Scriptures. His Christian belief is palpable, making all his doubts and hesitations unimportant.
No poem is a more brilliant hymn to faith than ‘Jonah and Me,’ a wondrous poem about the poet’s donkey ‘Jonah’: “I had filled the salley creels on either/ side of Jonah, from the footings dried in the sun/ where the peat-thickened water wallowed dark/ from the deep veins of earth, and we started back,/ Jonah and me, good companions.”
This intensity has often filled him with a yearning to teach, a yearning he has fulfilled through poetry”
The poem recalls for us that moment in Numbers 22, when Baalam’s donkey sees the angel of God with his fiery sword upon the roadway but Baalam is blind to the spiritual revelation. The donkey makes three attempts to avoid hitting the angel and is beaten until God gives the power of speech to the dumb animal that says to its master: “What have I done to make you beat me…”
That such beasts, that flora, that fauna, have something to say to us has been part of Deane’s mental equipment from the beginning of his career. A child’s Achill is in him with all its detail and intensity.
This intensity has often filled him with a yearning to teach, a yearning he has fulfilled through poetry, as well as through his time in Loyola University, Boston College and Notre Dame – places where he encountered a buoyant and prosperous Catholicism more in tune with the immense powers of his own faith.
Poets
That unhesitating grandeur of American faith is now a balm to the shattered confidence of Irish Catholics: how unexpected a gift, that they should now hand back to us what we once gave to them. Deane has had the luck to have regularly encountered that world, and in many tragic ways, it is Irish-America that might respond best to the intensity of Jonah and Me.
There are so many poems here that deserve close reading; lyrics like ‘Midwinter’, ‘Of Human Flesh’, and ‘While the Note Lasts’:
“In the high branches of the eucalyptus, a blackbird
watches, waiting. I, too, hold still by the window,
lingering. The lupins, that stood high in pride,
are wilted now, assuming the sadder aspects of age…”
The quality here is elegiac, yet the poet waits with the blackbird for some instruction from afar. Deane’s poetry is full of such moments, of revelatory locations, whether in downtown Chicago or in sea-scarred Achill. This new collection is yet one more resting place, another roadside inn, in the long journey of Deane’s faith; a poetic journey that has always called him into intense silence: “leaving a certainty that will transmute, / over the remaining years, into the end of longing.”
