Dear Pilgrims [Paperback]

With ‘Crocus: a brief history’, John F. Deane sets hisDear Pilgrimsin motion, a series of brief histories of time, a time that is rich in incident and in redemption. In a decisively secular age, Deane’s is a poetry of Christian belief. It explores renewal, alive with and to the kinds of witness he has learned from George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins and R.S. Thomas. His ‘I’, like theirs, makes space for a reluctant ‘us’.

Dear Pilgrimsincludes actual pilgrimages. The poet moves through England (East Anglia in particular), Israel and Palestine, disclosing a ‘new testament’ that revisions the Christian faith through the eyes of an unknown female disciple of Christ. He vividly adapts the Middle English poem Pearl and realises it for our time. He is also a master of the sonnet as an instrument of love, doubt and faith.

The poet’s voice, perhaps because of the timeless wisdom it carries, is vital and contemporary. It is no surprise that the founder ofPoetry Irelandand Dedalus Press is a poet of wide reading and vision. The clarity of his verse and purpose makes his voice unique. Rowan Williams celebrates his ‘Music, a stony, damp and deeply alive landscape (both Ireland and the Holy Land), a passionate and searching engagement with God’.

John F. Deane was born on Achill Island in 1943. He foundedPoetry Ireland—the National Poetry Society—andThe Poetry Ireland Reviewin 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. He was Teilhard de Chardin Fellow in Christian Studies at Loyola University, Chicago, in 2016 and taught a course in poetry. John F. Deane’s poetry has been translated and published in France, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Romania, Italy, Slovakia, Sweden and other countries. His poel#8