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‘The long hangar of the turf shed
faces the Broad Road where cars whine.
There our winter warmth is stored . . .’

For more than half a century John Montague has brought a lively diversity of voice and experience to Irish poetry. ‘He is,’ as John Carey wrote in The Sunday Times, ‘virtually Ireland’s poet laureate . . . His best poems are all autobiographical, and mostly about his aunts’ farm in County Tyrone . . . Splinter-sharp, they go straight to the heart, and catch in the memory like burrs.’

Speech Lessons, his latest collection, reprises the great themes of his work — his own, his family’s and his province’s histories. From signs of silent affection on that Ulster farm, the stations of a journey towards a fluent voice, re-imaginings of a bicycle trip along the Marne in the late 1940s and reflections on a President’s resignation, he continues his acts of excavation and recreation. ‘In My Grandfather’s Mansion’, a compendium of memories and another of the author’s extended works with a hint of the epic note, is the hub of an uncommonly enterprising and exuberant book.

Date of Publication: 1st July 2011
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Reviews

Writing as the future whirls past

IN 2009, TO CELEBRATE his 80th birthday, the Gallery Press published a refreshing variation on the standard Selected Poems by way of tribute to John Montague’s long career. Chosen Lights crowd-sourced its selection, asking 30 poets to name and comment on their favourite Montague poems.

The result featured poems from each of Montague’s collections, and a commentary that noted the distinctiveness of Montague’s style: his use of autobiography, the cool carefulness of his diction, the border that dominates his national poems. Now, two years later, Montague has written a book that adds to and inflects our understanding of his work.

Speech Lessons (Gallery, 72pp, €11.95) elaborates on a landscape and society with which his readers will be familiar. The poems dwell on ancestors, but the sequence ostensibly addressed to the memory of his grandfather segues into poems that remember the women of his family: as ever, Montague’s poems swerve away from readerly expectations. Silences begins as a pronouncement on poetry but turns, quickly, into a love poem, “a prayer before an unknown altar”. Montague’s poems may be newly nostalgic about the days of horse and cart, but the old analytic intelligence is evident, defending his choice of subject matter, maybe, when he observes “the future, already whirling past” ('The Long Hangar').

“Remarks are not literature,” said Gertrude Stein, but Montague’s pointed asides on Thomas Hardy and Máire Mhac an tSaoi, and tributes to John Berryman and others, do throw his own aesthetic and political preoccupations into sharp relief. His insistence on mischief is nicely caught in the rhyming lines which remember “that grown-ups of some importance / may still frolic like infants” ('One Bright Sunday'), a sentiment enacted by his ecstatic portrait of Christ:

I saw a tiny Christ
caper on the cross
silent as a salamander
writhing in fire
('Baldung’s Vision')

— John McAuliffe, The Irish Times, 16 July 2011

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