Hill Field — Edited by Thomas Dillon Redshaw
Poems and Memoirs for John Montague on the occasion of his 60th birthday.

Like a birthday bouquet of wildflowers, Hill Field gathers poems, memoirs, and graphics from forty-four writers and artists with whom John Montague has worked and studied during the past three decades. These contributions reveal Montague's distinctively Irish and broadly international fidelities to his personal and political vision. They outline, as well, the contours of his artistic biography. This international tribute includes prose and poetry from Samuel Beckett, Robert Bly, Seamus Heaney, Robert Durcan, Thom Gunn, Thomas Kinsella, Ted Hughes, Derek Mahon, William Kennedy, Francis Stuart and Kathleen Raine. The artists represented include Jack Coughlin, Barrie Cooke, Morris Graves, S.W. Hayter, and Evelyn Montague. Hill Field closes with a descriptive checklist of John Montague's published works (to date of publication, 1989).

‘John Montague is very much the Irish poet. He has all the credentials: His middle name is Patrick, he was educated at St Patrick’s College, Armagh, he [taught] in Cork, he edited The Book of Irish Verse, and he was born in Brooklyn. It is because his poems find love hard — whether it is the love of Ireland or of individuals — that they do find love . . . The poems embody a principled resistance to easy forms of talk, whether low or high-flown . . . Mr Montague’s own craftsmanship is everywhere alive and nowhere obtrusive . . . [Montague] always writes well of calm and calmness . . . [and he] particularly values the calm that must always acknowledge that it cannot last.’
                                                                                       — Christopher Ricks, The New York Times Book Review