John F. Deane is a vital and generous presence in Irish poetry. New and Selected Poems gathers work from Deane's five previous Carcanet collections, alongside a new sequence, Snow Falling on Chestnut Hill. Written with an inquiring intelligence, these poems of a dozen years meditate on the relevance of Christian spirituality to our troubled times. Each of the twelve poems in the title sequence presents a movement of the spirit, from the author's childhood in the west of Ireland, through the death of a wife, to the birth of a grandchild. Arranged in the manner of an orchestral symphony, each section takes its cue from a different piece of music, from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony to Mozart's Laudate Dominum. The sequence traces, phase by phase, the development of a Christian life. Faith, in its broadest sense, is inflected by imagination.
