John F. Deane is a vital presence in contemporary Irish poetry. The poems in Semibreve combine lyric grace with a fiercely questing intelligence, pushing against the mysteries of faith in a fractured world, paying tribute to the value of human life and love. Running through the book is a thread of elegy for the poet's brother, who died of cancer in 2010. Throughout, Deane gives poetic voice to the paradox of human existence as simultaneously blessed and broken.