Dear Pilgrims

John F. Deane’s poetry of Christian belief in a decisively secular age explores how redemption and renewal might emerge. He writes in the sincere, troubled, wide-awake tradition of Gerard Manley Hopkins and R. S. Thomas. Like theirs, his concerns are contemporary, his ‘I’ speaks for a reluctant ‘us’. Dear Pilgrims describes actual pilgrimages as 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, one of Christ’s contemporaries, examining in detail the demanding beauty of the natural world and its relationship to a transcendent reality.