JOHN F. DEANE

JOHN F. DEANE

BIOGRAPHIE

JOHN F. DEANE est né en Irlande en 1943. Il habite Dublin où il dirige une maison d'édition The Dedalus Press. En 1979 il a fondé «Poetry Ireland», la société nationale de poésie, et leur journal The Poetry Ireland Review. Il a publié plusieurs recueils, dont Walking on Water (1994). Depuis 1996, il est secrétaire général de l'Académie Européenne de Poésie. En 1998 il a reçu le Prix O'Shaughnessy aux Etats-Unis.

JOHN F. DEANE was born in Achill Island, Co Mayo, in 1943. He lives in Dublin and edits The Dedalus Press. In 1979 he found Poetry Ireland, the national poetry society, and its journal The Poetry Ireland Review. He is author of several cellections of poetry, including Walking on Water (1994). In 1996, he was elected Secretary General of the European Academy of Poetry. He is the recipient of the 1998 O'Shaughnessy Poetry Award.

LIVRE PARU AUX EDITIONS PHI

Christ, avec renard urbain

QUELQUES POEMES D'CHRIST AVEC RENARD URBAIN

In Dedication

Under the trees the fireflies
zip and go out, like galaxies;
our best poems, reaching in from the periphery,
are love poems, achieving calm.

On the road, the cries of a broken rabbit
were pitched high in their unknowing;
our vehicles grind the creatures down
till the child's tears are for all of us,

dearly beloved, ageing into pain,
and for herself, for what she has discovered
early, beyond this world's loveliness. Always
after the agitated moments, the search for calm.

Curlews scatter now on a winter field, their calls
small alleluias of survival; I offer you
poems, here where there is suffering and joy,
evening, and morning, the first day.

En dédicace

Dance of The Hours (Moderato)

They are teaching you the clock, how to tell
time: an old man's face, two fingers
pointing; and other
sing-song things till the world begins to fill

with the future, purposes for your still-slight
self. Night comes early now,
tail-lights are poison berries
against the black-green foliage of night;

it is the rhythmic fall and lift,
Gregorian chant of stars and seasons,
miracles of obedience
I point you to, the epiphanic gifts

of redwing, fieldfare, the godwit's sound.
Morning, cars furred with frost;
we water them and they breathe out like cattle

turning cautiously onto difficult ground; we would sleep this harshest season through
wrapped in ourselves like bears, dreaming
of fuchsia, apple blossom, bees.
I gathered you from school,

we stood on the bridge to watch a train
crescendo from the south;
you put your hands to your ears and screamed
as it rushed beneath and died away

towards the north; sleeper after sleeper, stave-notes,
the self needs purposes
of past and future. Come
from the bridge; you are young yet

in the music, a dead mother
will be a difficult life-partner; at the high
spiked gates out of childhood you pluck
the frets of a badly-tuned guitar,

your song yourself, false
notes, disaster-chords. Near home the river
deepens before the sea; through black depths
like a Bach cantata the water flows;

on the mud-flats a black-iron boiler lies
deep in slob. Home at last we lit
a wax candle for the man who has died,
that stubbled face, those aqueous humoured eyes,

reader in the testament of pain.
A full moon leans over the parishes, bathes
the marsh-fields, glaur and mud-daub
in an alabaster glow; we flow through time

note by impossible note, out
towards etemity;
the old man's face,
the fingers, pointing; and the candle lit

for old time's sake,
for what has happened
and goes on happening, for our
unfathomable days.

Danse des heures (moderato)

Artist

This was the given image -
a moulded man-body
elongated into pain, the head
sunk in abandonment : the cross;

I see it now
as the ultimate in ecstacy,
attention focused, the final words
rehearsed; there are black

nail-heads and contrasting
plashes of blood
like painter's oils : self-portrait
with grief and darkening sky;

something like Hopkins,
our intent, depressive scholar
who gnawed on the knuckle-bones of words
for sustenance - because God

scorched his bones with nearness
so that he cried with a loud voice
out of the entangling, thorny
underbrush of language.

Artiste

Kesh

They sit for hours on small
fold-up canvas chairs and hunch themselves
out over their knees; absent a while; fishing;
on the water a float, red and white, jigging;

the summer cruisers at their gossiping,
at anchor off the wooden kesh, our elders
on their recliners grateful for the sun;

if you squeeze your eyes you see tiny spots
jigging against the high blue of heaven;
if you see farther you may glimpse

Jesus, appearing, disappearing, among lake-shore trees;

his footsteps clatter a moment on the boardwalk
and when you turn, anxious suddenly,
there is no one there: as if he were unsure

whether to call them from their fishing
or contemplate the perfect yellow lilies
rising from the fetid mud; he, too,
scrounging about, like the rest of us, for meaning.

Kesh

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