John F. Deane shapes his new collection, Manhandling the Deity, in a framework that calls to mind the Roman Catholic mass, celebrated for the living and the dead. The poems test out ways of living in the contemporary world while navigating by the lights of traditional belief. Spiritual and poetic urgency are here of a piece.


Deane writes as a fallen Everyman on a redemptive journey. Sacramental forms lead the reader on through single poems and sequences: sonnets, free verse and translations are touched with the same grace, until, as he says in ‘Canticle’, ‘the universe stills to…the given note of a perfect music’.