SOURCE: "The Razors of Perception," in Irish Literary Supplement, Vol. 8, No. 2, Fall, 1989, p. 20.

In the following review, Halpin provides an overview of Selected Poems, outlining the general characteristics of Deane's poetry.

In the course of an interview several years ago, Thomas Kinsella was challenged to assert the value of the artistic act, conditioned as it is both by the inevitable limitations of the artist as a human being and by the apparently unrestructurable nature of reality itself, its random disorder and dispiriting contingency. Kinsella's reply was clear: "If an artistic response is called into existence, that itself modifies the situation. It's a positive response even if we never solve anything. It colours reality in a way that makes it more acceptable." This is not the only way of understanding poetry and its relation to the material of the writer's experience, but for certain temperaments; particularly when the realities...