Manhandling the Deity

John F. Deane shapes his new collection, Manhandling the Deity, in a framework that calls to mind the Roman Catholic mass, celebrated for the living and the dead. The poems test out ways of living in the contemporary world while navigating by the lights of traditional belief. Spiritual and poetic urgency are here of a piece.

Deane writes as a fallen Everyman on a redemptive journey. Sacramental forms lead the reader on through single poems and sequences: sonnets, free verse and translations are touched with the same grace, until, as he says in ‘Canticle’, ‘the universe stills to…the given note of a perfect music’.

John F. Deane was born on Achill Island, Co Mayo, Ireland. He is the founder of Poetry Ireland, the National Poetry Society, and The Poetry Ireland Review. He is founder of the Dedalus Press, of which he was editor from 1985 until 2006. In 2006 he was visiting scholar in the Burns Library of Boston College, and in 2016 was Teilhard de Chardin Fellow in Christian Studies, Loyola University, Chicago and taught a course in poetry. In 2019 he was visiting poet in Notre Dame University, Indiana. His poems have been translated into many languages and in 2022 the Polish Publisher, Znak, published his Selected Poems in Polish translation. Deane is the recipient of many awards for his poetry, he is a member of Aosdána, the body established by the Arts Council to honour artists 'whose work has made an outstanding contribution to the arts in Ireland'. In 2007 he was made Chevalier en l'ordre des arts et des lettres by the French Government. The fine arts press, Guillemot, Cornwall, in 2019 published a limited edition book, Like the Dewfall and in 2022 a further booklet, Voix Celeste, both with artwork by Tony Martin. In late 2022, Irish Pages Press published Darkness Between Stars, a selection of poems focusing on questions of faith and poetry by both John F. Deane and James Harpur, including an email dialogue on their individual writing processes. His latest collections from Carcanet are Naming of the Bones (2021) and Selected and New Poems (2023). Author photo taken by Moya Nolan.