Gravity and Grace

Gravity keeps John Desmond’s work always rooted in the earthy particulars of Heaney’s poetry—personal, political, historical, and textual. And grace makes his study illuminating and exhilarating to read. Using the writing of Simone Weil as a crucial intertext, Desmond, like Heaney himself, writes at the crossroads where necessity and mystery, the mundane and the numinous, come into contact with and complicate each other.

~Gary Ciuba, Professor of English, Kent State University

In Gravity and Grace: Seamus Heaney and the Force of Light, John Desmond turns his brilliance away from Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy to Seamus Heaney, Simone Weil, and their literary nexus, Czeslaw Milosz. Against the flattening forces of gravity in our times, Desmond turns to Heaney to find Weil’s metaxu, the realm between immanence and transcendence, the glimpsed but evanescent world, that stands always in the quotidian world, but that more than ever needs the poet’s voice and vision to make it known and experienced. Desmond’s readings of Heaney’s poetic oeuvre are marked with awe and humility, and they are themselves the force of light brought to awareness in love.

~Edward J. Dupuy, Dean of Graduate Studies, Savannah College of Art and Design

Desmond's close readings of individual poems... reveal intertextual appropriations from the classics, Karl Jung, and visual art as well as Heaney's nuanced depiction of "the Troubles."... Recommended.

~CHOICE

Returning to the already critically well-ploughed terrain of Heaney's poetry, John F. Desmon nevertheless manages to bring us something fresh and new. Writing against the grain of popular critical fashion, he aims to re-focus our attention on Heaney’s fundamentally religious poetic sensibility. In this excellent, highly readable study, Desmon makes his case with passionate moral conviction and a lucid and reliable critical intelligence.

~Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, Professor of English Literature, University of Ulster, Northern Ireland