The fox and the hare appear repeatedly in John F. Deane's poems, insistent and emblematic: the fox a vulnerable other glimpsed in a suburban dawn and the hare "surefooted in a world at odds with everything" . . . "a watcher, like me, on the battlements of himself." They're the two governing principles of the poems, one bearing the weight of grief and pain, the other a need for a kind of insouciant reach above circumstances, above "the burden of another day". Reynolds in the sequence of that name is a kind of fox-man, a refugee from an older order living at the centre of a housing estate that used to be a monastery, clinging onto "old vestiges of hope,/a masterful inner craving that there be/more to life than lotteries and a semi-d."
In "The Fox-God" a trapped fox cries out to the fox-god who isn't there; many of Deane's poems utter the same cry to the God who may be there, whose absence is more keenly felt than his presence, whom the poems argue with and for, balancing anger with acceptance and love. John F. Deane is in this sense a religious poet, in the way a poet like R.S. Thomas is: everything is in the argument, and the argument begins in the opening poem, "Penance": "They leave their shoes, like signatures, below;/above, their God is waiting. Slowly they rise/along the mountainside . . . " Their shoes, their God. And the mountain, too, is indifferent, unchanged "by this mere/trafficking of shale".
Deane's poetry doesn't offer any blind acts of faith. The poems are often attempts to locate the presence of God: "perhaps God/is the ocean we step out on/through death, into our origins . . ." or "The sea surrounds us in the way, we hope,/God's care surrounds us . . . " There are meditations on Christ as a kind of artist, "something like Hopkins . . . / who gnawed on the knuckle-bones of words/ for sustenance - because God/scorched his bones with nearness . . . ", or as an urban fox "grown/ secretive before our bully-boy modernity".
In "A Real Presence" the poet glimpses a fox in the early morning and whispering its name leaves him "thrilling, as if to name it were enough/ to have everything back in place, the hedgerows,/immanence, survival, the eternal laws." "Patrick" looks back at a tradition of faith in the light of a venal present; "The Prophet", again, imagining the progress of a poet-prophet from childhood to radio stardom, is a search for belief, and for the "mercy" and "grace" sometimes found in language.
This book offers a carefully culled selection from John F. Deane's earlier books alongside a substantial section of new work. The arrangement, the "toccata" of the old followed by the "fugue" of the new, is designed to foreground the recent work, and the second half of the book is certainly the strongest, its many fine new poems including the sequence `Reynolds" and the ambitious title poem "Fugue".
This poem, with its origin in painful personal experience, is a powerful, passionate address to specific individuals - a wife, a father, a daughter - but if it answers to its private occasions, it also ramifies beyond them in its effort to find meaning in the heart of suffering. "Our best poems, reaching in from the periphery,/are love poems, achieving calm", the dedicatory poem says. There is sense of liberation in this poem, of a release into articulation; the result is the most fluent, loosened and adventurous poetry of his career.
Peter Sirr's next collection of poetry Bring Everything will be published by Gallery Press in November.