Poetry: When Donald Davie wrote the Introduction for his New Oxford Book of Christian Verse in 1980, the churches were already in disarray. Twenty-three years on, after more momentous changes and a series of scandals, they can hardly be said to be in better shape, writes George Szirtes.
According to Davie, Christian poetry "will be poetry that appeals . . . to some one or more of the distinctive doctrines of the Christian church" or at least perceives those doctrines in the narratives of Bible and tradition. He qualifies "doctrinal" to include the sacramental.
John F. Deane's entire book is shaped by a wounded Christian belief, and particularly by the form of the Mass. Gerard Manley Hopkins offers him one of three epigraphs to the collection, with his cry: "Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?"
That cry of despair marks out Deane's sense of kinship with Hopkins, though his language and pitch are different. Deane's concern is with the vulnerable: with the small (the word "small" itself recurs throughout the book), the humble, the passing and the dead. It is a poetry dominated by rural imagery - the miraculous beauty of the mayfly on a fishing trip, horses and carts, bees among foxglove thimbles - and by images of the crucifixion, which casts its shadow everywhere.
There is a parallel world of lost things: his father's office with its "papers, notes, files, inks and dossiers", "a window, frosted/ husks of flies, a woman's black silk glove". There are also beautiful reworkings of old anonymous poems, like the Anglo-Saxon 'Seafarer', Colman's 'Father to Son', and others.
Chiefly it is the sense of broken piety, indeed of all things broken, that animates the whole. Every observed event or phenomenon is a kind of embodiment of the breaking of Christ's body on the cross, or, as in the case of the old man who falls off his bike then gets up again in 'Mercy', an image of the Resurrection.
In this way Davie's criteria are fully met: all is meditation of doctrine and sacrament. Lines and themes move through the book and recur in various poems..
There are formal repetitions as in the use of Dante's terza rima, and there are simple liturgical echoes as in the repeated lines of 'The Wild Meadow'.
The contemporary world, when it appears, is a useful reminder that the poems are not the product of a purely monastic existence, albeit of a kind of monastic temperament. Our world irrupts with aeroplanes and rough-sleepers but most prominently with wars and disasters.
It is something to find such a voice alive and working to such effect. Nowhere is it bossy or cloying, but properly devotional and, at the same time, bereft, like holed sackcloth.
George Szirtes is a poet and translator from the Hungarian. His most recent books are The Budapest File (Bloodaxe, 2000) and An English Apocalypse (Bloodaxe, 2001)
Manhandling the Deity. By John F. Deane, Carcanet, 80pp, £8.95