The authors’ own Introduction to this beautifully produced hardback book notes that Deane and Harpur

have known each other for many years and shared readings,
discussions and introduced each other’s work, finding friendship
and mutual encouragement in discovering that [they] were both
fascinated not only by the life of poetry but also by the divine,
the sacred, ‘God’.

It is this fascination, and the writing out of it, which underpins this ‘joint selection’ of poems: although there are poems about a wide range of subjects, they are, the authors suggest, ‘poems in search of God’, poems which ‘bear witness to […] probings into the ineffable’.

This raises two issues. Firstly, I hoped for more of a poetic conversation, and not a selection of poems by each author, the one followed by the other; perhaps even new work, produced in collaboration or as a direct response to the other’s work. Secondly…