Darkness Between Stars – The Irish Catholic review 23rd March 2023
This book is an entirely unexpected project. Two poets of seniority and assured reputation have come together to publish the poetic faith essence of their many-volumed careers.
Deane is a Catholic poet who once studied for the priesthood and Harpur is a highly educated Classicist from the Anglican and Quaker traditions. Deane has been Teilhard de Chardin Fellow in Christian Studies at Loyola University in Chicago while Harpur has translated Boethius and written brilliantly upon Iona, Lindisfarne and the Book of Kells. This charge-sheet of Christian endeavours surely condemns them in our age of humanist literature. But they have endured spectacularly; and this new book comes to us as one more of their flaring assertions of the value of belief.
The book is not only important as a joint quest of faith, but for the marvellous selection of the best poems by both poets; it demonstrates how questions of tradition and belief are crucial scaffoldings in the infrastructure of their own best poems…