‘This is the way towards kindness’he said, ‘believe me’, and I did;I saw the small brown flecks of wisdomlike rust-drops on his hands;six blind, sleek, mewling kittensbirth-wet and innocent of clawhe gathered into a hessian bagwith stones for travelling companionsand swung and swung it through the blue airand out into the waters of the lake.Sometimes still I see them scrabbling,their snout-heads raised, their bodiesnude and shivering in an alien element,sometimes — when I see the children,their big, wide-open eyes unseeing,skin stretched dry and crinklinglike leather and above them the blue sky,that enviable sun shining — again I hear‘this is the way towards kindness,believe me’ and I do, I do, I do.
Father
John F. Deane
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“Father” from SELECTED AND NEW POEMS: by John F. Deane.
Published by Carcanet Press on November 30, 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by John F. Deane.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
John F. Deane was born on the island of Achill off the west coast of Ireland. He is the founder of Poetry Ireland, the national poetry society, and of its journal The Poetry Ireland Review. He has published many collections of poetry with the UK publisher, Carcanet, the most recent being Selected and New Poems in 2023. A new collection, Moses and Me, is due in late 2025 from Carcanet. His work has been translated into many languages, the most recent being Polish and Norwegian. He has won many awards for his poems and has been made a Chevalier dans l’ordre des arts et des lettres by the French government. He has been poet-in-residence in Boston College, in Loyola University, Chicago and given readings in Notre Dame Indiana and in many countries around the world. He lives in Dublin.
"This generous selection of his work does several things, but perhaps chief among them is to highlight his obsessions, his touchstones and totems, by gathering work from across his many books that demonstrates a striking coherence."
—Declan Ryan, The Irish Times
"Regular readers of this Irish poet have come to expect such brilliant phrasemaking - and the risks that accompany it. For the poems collected here are indeed an 'edgy festival', as full of unexpected plunges into the metaphysical as of glittering physical detail, 'written... in the on-going love-affair between self and world'."
—Fiona Sampson, The Guardian
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