Review of Song of the Goldfinch, A Memoir (Veritas, 2023)

 Review of Song of the Goldfinch: Memoir (2023), Veritas, Dublin by John F. Deane

John F. Deane is a well-known Irish and international poet who was born on Achill Island, County Mayo, Ireland.  He has also authored two novels and several collections of short stories.  Much of his work reflects the beauty, tranquillity and at times the ruggedness and wildness of this unspoilt landscape and powerful seascape.  His curriculum vitae is impressive.  He is the founder of the national poetry society called Poetry Ireland and of its prestigious and internationally acknowledged journal Poetry Ireland Review. He is also the founder of the Dedalus Press, of which he was editor from 1985 until 2006. In 2006 he was a visiting scholar in the Burns Library of Boston College, and in 2016 was Teilhard de Chardin Fellow in Christian Studies at Loyola University, Chicago. In 2019 he was a visiting poet at Notre Dame University, Indiana.

His poems have been translated into many languages, and in 2007 he was made Chevalier en l'ordre des arts et des lettres by the French Government. He is a member of Aosdána, the body established by the Arts Council to honour artists 'whose work has made an outstanding contribution to the arts in Ireland'. In late 2022, Irish Pages Press published Darkness Between Stars, a selection of poems focusing on questions of faith and poetry by both John F. Deane and James Harpur.  His latest book is from Carcanet (2023) Selected and New Poems.  The book, which I am reviewing here, The Song of the Goldfinch was also published in 2023 and is a memoir of profound and inspiring insight.

The Song of the Goldfinch as a memoir recounts the spiritual journey of John F Deane and highlights the major epiphanies he had on that authentic way to selfhood.  The image of the goldfinch is a well-chosen emblem for both the title and the cover of the book as it is a very pretty bird as well as being associated with Christ's Passion and his crown of thorns. The European goldfinch appears in pictures of the Madonna and Christ child and represents the foreknowledge Jesus and Mary had of the Crucifixion. Little wonder that Deane chose such a beautiful bird to represent his life’s journey and his love of nature.

This memoir gives the reader an account of his faith from his childhood and early adulthood as a strict Roman Catholic through his life as an internationally acclaimed writer and poet. It is an evocative examination of his time as a novice and seminarian with the Spiritan Order, then called the Holy Ghost Order, and of his tireless exploration of alternative Christian approaches, punctuated by poetry, both published and previously unpublished. Its insights and experiences are unique to the author as an individual and a poet, and yet wholly relevant to the Christian faith in our challenging times.  I would call John F. Deane a Christian humanist who has plumbed the depths of spirituality and who praises the Creator God through his Teilhardian approach to nature. He recalls his first reading the work, The Hymn of the Universe, of this great Jesuit scholar and palaeontologist, Teilhard de Chardin in the original French when he was a student in U.C.D. in the early 1960s. Here is how he recounts the impact of Teilhard’s mysticism on him:

I got a sense of Teilhard’s vision of God as the fire that gives the cosmos its energy; of the Eucharist that is its sharing in the life of God.  I relished the idea that it is the world’s labour that makes the bread and that the body of Christ is in that labour, and I saw the blood of the workers of the earth’s offerings as the blood of the wine of Eucharist.  (p. 129)

Again, another designation I could give Deane would be that of a panentheist, that is, one who believes that God is greater than the universe and includes and interpenetrates it.  Here is how Deane describes his belief system today:

To call oneself a Roman Catholic is perfectly fine, but I prefer now to touch on the wider sense of Catholicity, to see my faith as all-embracing, to include all peoples, all honestly held belief and unbelief, all work that moves to forward humanity in peace, justice and harmony.  To be a Christian then is to be aware that the whole cosmos is moving and evolving as one, that all through time something new is being continuously formed and re-formed through the force of evolution. (p. 162)

[A Relevant Aside: Any reader of these rather random and diverse posts will know that I count myself as a believer in the same vein as John F. Deane, and I, too, have spent my life searching for meaning and indeed making meaning within this broader Christian/mystical sense.  Some posts explore beliefs totally contrary to my own, but only as a way of challenging my beliefs and making me think, feel and act in a more self-consciously knowledgeable and authentic way.]

Reading The Song of the Goldfinch, I was reminded of J.H. Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua wherein he writes lovingly about his spiritual bond with his late sister Mary, his youngest sister who died in 1828 at the age of 18.  Newman was to remain spiritually close to her all his life.  The connection with John F. Deane is that he has a similar association with his aunt and godmother who also died young.  This is what he says about her:

Patricia Connors died less than two months after my baptism, on 28 January 1944; she was only twenty-four years old.  I have a photograph of her on my desk, and she was clearly quite glamorous.  She has somehow come into my life again over the last decade or so… I will not use the word ‘haunted’, but I am aware of her at odd times, and often… Clearly, that presence is an imagined one… and perhaps my strong imagination requires her near me. (p. 16 – 17)

This book is suffused with not only the presence of his late aunt and godmother but with other strong presences in the family especially his grandmother with whom he was extremely close as a youngster and young man.  Significantly, it was at her death that one of the major spiritual turning points happened in Deane’s life – it was at that crisis point that he realised that religious life and celibacy were not for him and he left the Spiritan Order.  From her, he had learnt much about the history of the family and the island, and especially about the old customs and folklore connected thereto.  Mark Patrick Hederman OSB, in his review of this memoir, sums Deane’s style up succinctly when he says that “here Huckleberry Finn meets Dylan Thomas on Achill Island, a lost world of corncrakes and ragamuffins.  Captivating. I loved this book.”  If you are a nature lover, you, too, will love this book.

Furthermore, if you are in any way musical, you will be particularly enchanted with it as it is also steeped in musical allusions.  Deane had accomplished grade VIII in piano before he left secondary school and later trained on the church organ while at school and as a student priest.  Hence this wonderful memoir has both musical references and indeed the very words are both musical and poetic. Again, if you are a music lover, you will love this book: you will be in for a treat with his inspired reflection on the musician Olivier Messiaen (p. 168).

The book finishes on a mystical note by quoting the philosopher-scientist, David Bohm who sees “a subtle but dynamic spirit” at work in all creation which is moving towards “an unbroken whole.”  And, we have doubtless all intuited Deane’s final sentence which is an encomium to the song of the goldfinch, which is essentially one of “the whole cosmos.” (p. 187).

This is a profound and inspiring book to which I will come back again and again by way of edifying and spiritual reading.