Song of the Goldfinch

** PRE-ORDER ONLY**
*Expected April 2023*

About the Book:
Song of the Goldfinch is a beautifully written faith memoir tracing John F. Deane’s time as a strict Roman Catholic on Achill Island to his faith as it stands at present. This memoir is a vivid journey through his time spent as a novice and seminarian, through discovery of alternative Christian approaches, all of it in prose form, but linked by poems, both published and unpublished. The book offers insights and experiences that are unique to him as an individual and published poet, and yet wholly relevant to Christian faith in our difficult times.

About the Author:
John F. Deane is a writer and poet. He has had eight collections of poetry published in Manchester by Carcanet, including Naming of the Bones (2021). He spent five years as a Holy Ghost novice and seminarian; studied poetry and faith and has published several books of essays on poets of faith, such as Hopkins, Herbert, Heaney and Kinsella. He is the founder of Poetry Ireland and Dedalus Press. He has taught poetry and faith in Boston College as Burns scholar and in Loyola University, Chicago, as Teilhard de Chardin visiting scholar.

Reviews:
‘Once every blue moon a book is written on parchment and in dried blood. Here Huckleberry Finn meets Dylan Thomas on Achill Island, a lost world of corncrakes and ragamuffins. Captivating. Truly wonderful. I loved this book, I think you might too.’
Mark Patrick Hederman, OSB, author of Crimson and Gold: Life as a Limerick, 2021.

‘In Song of the Goldfinch Deane traces the delicate thread of poetry making and faith-making from an idyllic childhood on the wild shores of the island of Achill, through his youthful experiences as a seminarian, to the mature understanding of old age. He evokes without sentimentality a world of wonder, as well as a journey through momentous change in the Catholic church. His poetry shows us unequivocally how the natural world points to the divine, and how the human world must recognise that. His descriptions of an enchanted Achill bring this world vividly before our eyes: we hear the sea, we see the mountains, we feel and smell the breath of an Atlantic wind that has blown across an ocean of faith and time to reach him’.
Hilary Davies is a poet, translator and critic; her fourth collection is Exile and the Kingdom, Enitharmon, 2016.