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ONLINE BOOKSTORE FEATURED TITLES
Songs of Earth and Light
Richesses: Francophone Songwriter Poets
Munster Literature Centre
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John F. Deane was born on Achill Island in 1943. He founded Poetry Ireland – the National Poetry Society – and The Poetry Ireland Review in 1979. He has published several collections of poetry and some fiction. Deane also won the O’Shaughnessy Award for Irish Poetry, the Marten Toonder Award for Literature and poetry prizes from Italy and Romania. In 2008 he became the President of the European Academy of Poetry. A member of Aosdána, his latest collection of poems is A Little Book of Hours, Carcanet (2008).
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Deane reading his prize-winning poem at the 2010 Cork Spring Literary Festival
Shoemaker First Prize, 2010 Gregory O'Donoghue Competition
He sat, cross-legged, on a deal table as if dropped, ready-made, from an old myth; sat, all hours, all days, lips pursed and fingers deft and fast, like the poet
who would see the world through a needle’s eye, difficult though penetrable, a shifting, leathery mass that might be shaped to something beautiful, and lasting. Like the itinerant Christ
walking the ranges of Galilee, nowhere to lay down his head. When I conjugate Christ, and longing, what I mean is the lake behind the cobbler’s house, its waters
soothing us constantly across the night; I mean trees, those summer mornings, standing high and stilled within their being; on wilder days the winds make shapes amongst them,
ghosts visiting the house, composing their wind-leaf harmonies: I want to be able to say, again, Christ. Our taciturn shoemaker sat, sometimes, outside, half-concentrating, half-
watching people go the road; he was one in a guild with swallows and the blooming of the haw, one with the people who went measuring their steps in to the small chapel to divine their living, who watched
snow falling, visible through the stained-glass windows, flakes that could be birds migrating, butterflies, or spirits out on spirit escapades. When I write cobbler, last or nail, or when I scribble
wine, or bread, or music, what I am stitching for is Christ, is how love may yet permeate the rush of trucks along our motorways, spray rising against the windscreens, the wipers sighing.
©2010 John F. Deane
Author Links 'An Eldering Congregation': poem by Deane in Southword Issue 17
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©2009 Southword Editions and Munster Literature Centre |
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