Reviews: Give Dust a Tongue: A Faith & Poetry Memoir and Semibreve by John F Deane

The English poet David Constantine, declaring his requirements for poetry in the Carcanet ‘Oxford Poets’ series which he edited, said he wanted ‘poetry that matters’. Few writers have honoured this requirement as consistently throughout a long poetry-writing life as John F.Deane, and the story is now told in his magical memoir Give Dust a Tongue. The title comes from George Herbert’s poem ‘Deniall’ which is included as an epigraph here:

O that thou shouldst give dust a tongue

To crie to thee.

Herbert is the great poet of conversation with God, which is why he is so crucial for Deane whose life has featured such conversations in a way that is unusual in our time. A strange section towards the end of the book shares its overall title and recounts a visit to Herbert and his wife at the parsonage of Bemerton near Bath in the 1630s where the poet parks his Toyota Prius hybrid after travelling on the ferry from Rosslare to Fishguard. Rather like Heaney’s crewman in the ‘Clonmacnoise’ poem, the two poets are marvels to each other.

Deane is a great traveller between worlds in his own right, from his upbringing on Achill Island, through a novitiate with the Holy Ghost Fathers to two blessed marriages. And of course there are poetry and Nature and music, all crucial to his life and vision. It is hard to think of a single term that encapsulates all these interests and compulsions: to call him a kind of Christian Pantheist would make him sound more withdrawn from the world than he is. Deane has strong views about worldly justice with which he is actively involved. When he visits in California his dying elder Jesuit brother Declan (Semibreve is dedicated in memory of him: the connexion between the two brothers is lifelong and profound), he mentions twice prayer-services organised by the protestors and prisoners on death row in the notorious San Quentin prison. If Deane is a kind of mystic, his mysticism is deeply involved with the world.

Give Dust a Tongue is organized in six sections: the first is more than a third of the book, describing his childhood and his family, most memorably his grandmother, Nanna, who is introduced with a very memorable sentence: ‘Nora Connors was the great love of my young life and remains so for me still, as a person of warmth and sorrow, kindliness and fear, thoughtfulness and loneliness’. It would be hard to imagine a better summary of the life and qualities of Irish countrypeople - women especially - in past generations.

His teacher-mother, Jo-Jo Connors has great prominence too and sets the scene for the whole agonistic drama of Deane’s life: she was a ‘strict Roman Catholic, with whom I fought, whom I loved deeply in my own way’. Section Two describes his schooling, leading to his life as a novice priest and his leaving the novitiate in Section Three. There is none of the Joycean fire and brimstone here; his spiritual director sends him to see a psychiatrist - a priest lecturer in UCD - who simply springs the question on him: ‘Do you want to stay in the Holy Ghost Fathers?’ and the immediate answer is ‘No’. The short Section Four is called ‘Winter in Meath’ and is dominated by his development as a poet, touching too on the death of his young wife, Barbara Sheridan, something which we get the impression was too painful to be dwelt on at length in a book which is insistently positive in the face of life’s tribulations.

The substantial Section Five deals with Deane’s life in poetry: not only the writing of it but his founding of Poetry Ireland and the Poetry Ireland Review. Deane is too modest to make much of this, but of course it would be hard to exaggerate the importance of this activity. This section also includes the narrative of the visit to the Herberts, and an appreciation of Hopkins after a visit to St Beuno’s in North Wales, the seminary where Hopkins had been so happy and productive. Finally, as a kind of coda, there is a sequence of twenty sonnets called ‘According to Lydia’, his own response to the question ‘Name and Nature: Who do you say that I am?’ which Deane had set for a special issue of Poetry Ireland Review on Jesus. These beautiful poems are mostly a response to a visit to the Holy Land which provides a perfect conclusion to this book of positive questioning in the face of mortality:

I work to keep the heart open, to hold to the blessing that made me aware, then, that I was blessed; glory in the once-fire that will be ash, in reason beyond reason. I work to cherish the variegated birdsong, the damson flowers blossoming when they will.

The organization of the book is its greatest success. Deane’s poems, some new and some already familiar, are woven into the prose fabric, rather in the way that medieval poets (often religious poets like Dante) created prose settings by way of explication of the poetry. Other welcome, previously encountered items here are the series of five ‘Miscellanies’ - mostly from the earlier life and recollections - drawn from Deane’s much loved contributions to RTE’s Sunday Miscellany. The occurrence of poems familiar from the memoir continues in Semibreve, the seventh volume of poems by Deane published by Carcanet. For example the wonderful poem ‘Blueberries’, written to his wife from California appears early in the book and in its chronological place in the memoir; ‘Viola d’Amore’, beginning with the poet playing ‘Bach on the great organ’, appears near the start of Semibreve and in the seminary section of the memoir. Semibreve is also divided into six sections, from the music-dominated first to the substantial final section which is where Deane’s grounded, spiritual pantheism is most in evidence. That is where we find the wonderful pair of elegies for his brother Declan (as in the memoir), where the poet watches the ‘dizzying flight of a humming-bird’ in the Californian cemetery. It all ends in the Holy Land again where the ‘void that is Yeshua' is filled in the book’s exultant last line: ‘I know enough/ has been given, enough given, and more than enough’.

In the aftermath of the wonderful Irish vote for same-sex marriage hard things have been said about the Church. But it is salutary to be reminded by these poems and memoirs of the virtues and importance of the spiritual perspectives too. They matter.

John F.Deane, Give Dust a Tongue. A Faith and Poetry Memoir (The Columba Press, 2015). ;£16.99

John F.Deane, Semibreve (Carcanet, 2015). £9.99