Manhandling the Deity

Deane John F.

This is a book full of one God in many aspects, at once strange and intimate, transcendent and physical, Son of the Almighty yet born of woman. The book, sacramentally shaped, follows three "offices" of the church, leading us towards an altar then releasing us, changed, to a world blessed by requiem. The voice that speaks is that of an everyman fallen from grace, who has the temerity to believe in the possibility of belief. In single poems and sequences, metered and free verse, he makes a way towards the window where light shines. Here the Psalms have taken flesh with the weight of passion that King David knew, and the lightening grace that the Catholic mystics attest to. Deane writes a poetry of place and passion.

About the Author

John F. Deane was born on Achill Island in 1943. He founded Poetry Ireland – the National Poetry Society – and "The Poetry Ireland Review" in 1978, and is the founder of The Dedalus Press, of which he was editor from 1985 until 2006. In 2008 he was visiting scholar in the Burns Library of Boston College. John F. Deane's poetry has been translated and published in France, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Romania, Italy, Slovakia, Sweden and other countries. His poems in Italian won the 2002 Premio Internazionale di Poesia Citta di Marineo. His fiction has been published by Blackstaff Press in Befast; his most recent novel "Where No Storms Come" was published by Blackstaff in 2011. He is the recipient of the O'Shaughnessy Award for Irish Poetry and the Marten Toonder Award for Literature. John F. Deane is a member of Aosdana, the body established by the Arts Council to honour artists "whose work had made an outstanding contribution to the arts in Ireland". His poetry has been shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award and the T. S. Eliot Prize. In 1996 Deane was elected Secretary-General of the European Academy of Poetry. In 2007 he was made Chevalier en l'ordre des arts et des lettres by the French government. He is currently the editor of Poetry Ireland Review.

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