JOHN MONTAGUE AT 80: John Montague was born this day 80 years ago in Brooklyn, New York, the child of Irish parents. To mark this milestone his publishers, the Gallery Press, asked an array of poets who have published with them to pick a Montague poem and write about it. Here, poet CIARAN BERRYexplores Montague's 'A Graveyard in Queens'
IF YOU LOOK at New York City on a map you will see, among the markings that delineate streets and rivers, bridges and peninsulas, large swathes of green space that signify, not just the presence of the city’s many parks, but also its umpteen graveyards.
In the Bronx there’s Woodlawn, which occupies more than 400 acres, and where the most notable occupants include Miles Davis and Herman Melville. In Brooklyn there’s Greenwood with its ornate Civil War-era gates where feral monk parrots make their home. You’ll notice, though, as you bend over your map, that most of New York’s graveyards are in Queens.
There’s a simple reason for this. As the population of Manhattan began to swell in the early 19th-century, the dead were uprooted to make room for the living, new tenements built where the deceased had been interred. Today there are more than five million of the departed at rest, or still restless, in the 29 or so graveyards of Queens, where the dead outnumber the living by three to one. On the stone slab over one of those graves is written the name of Louis Armstrong. On another you will find the name of Emma Lazarus whose poem adorns the Statue of Liberty.
You will also find, if you look hard enough, a stone inscribed with the name John Montague. Thankfully for us, it is not the John Montague born in St Catharine's Hospital on Bushwick Avenue, Brooklyn, on February 28th, 1929, the third son of James Montague and Mary ("Molly") Carney. It is instead the poet's uncle and "namesake", "the country fiddler" whose grave, which lies in the same plot as those of a second uncle and a cousin, Montague stands over with his still grieving aunt in A Graveyard in Queens.
I’d just arrived in New York when I first came across this poem in a selected volume I found in one of those dusty bookshops that used to dot Manhattan. I felt immediate kinship with the piece’s solemn, slightly disoriented poet, who has just returned from the “hidden village” of his ancestors to this “American earth”, the strange land of his birth. With great pleasure I followed the poet as he is led by a squirrel “through the water / sprinklered grass” to “sway” with his aunt above those graves. I could hear, as I can still, their footsteps rising and falling in the many terse, double and triple-stressed lines of a piece that sways back and forth between worlds in “the slow pride/ of a lament”.
So effortlessly we’re moved here from the poet’s present in a graveyard in Queens to his past in that “doll’s house” of aunts in his “supposed home”.
We’re even invited to look with him into the future as he submits “again/ to stare soberly” at his “own name/ cut on a gravestone”. Here, and elsewhere, the poem seems to manage shifts not just in time and place, but also in terms of the various meanings the word “home” might have, not just as dwelling and native land, but also as the abiding place of the affections (which the poet’s aunt finds in the grave that holds almost all her life) and as one’s abode after death.
Effortlessly too we’re led between the earth that holds this particular aunt’s “husband son” to the air where the “ghostly fiddle” of that other uncle still creaks, and from the sphere of humans, living and dead, to the sphere of creatures – that squirrel finally coming to a stop holding a nut or leaf “like an offering / inside its paws” and a waterhen “mournful” as she shushes her young “along the autumn // flood”, both of which, in this new world of “collapsing wreaths”, offer the poet consolation, just as his presence seems to offer consolation to his widowed aunt.
It seems that all this back and forth is brought about, or at least made more acute and therefore more palpable, by the poet’s own displacement, the disorientation of arriving in what seems to be again a new city, a new country, and of finding himself standing on the border between the living and the dead, Ireland and America, the world of adulthood and the world of childhood. Because, as he moves in these couplets, it seems to me the poet too is playing cartographer, orienting himself, and us, by making a map that traces lines between those places and times – a map that offers to guide us a little through a world, a life where there is “no end // to pain”, but also, he would add, “nor of / love to match it”, which is a handy map to have wherever you are.
EAVAN BOLAND on reading John Montague
"I remember exactly where I was when I first read All Legendary Obstacles. It was my introduction to John Montague's work and it was 1966. The big, awkward-to-hold Dolmen book, with its cream endpapers and mock-vellum boards was a true surprise. It was also the year of my final exams at Trinity. I would be required therefore, for hour upon hour, to answer questions on British court poets and Renaissance essayists. Now here, all of a sudden, was an Irish poet, as familiar with the Central Valley as Garvaghey, inscribing both with a migrant, unsettled and luminously estranged sense of place."
MICHAEL LONGLEY on meeting John Montague for the first time
“I am reminded of when I first met John Montague decades ago on the campus of Queen’s University in Belfast. He emerged out of the darkness of the quadrangle and into the dimly-lit colonade that led to the lecture theatre where he was going to read. This poet whom I had been studying for years all of a sudden took shape like one of his slim-lined poems. ‘We meet at last,’ he said.
He was nimble and wry, a commanding presence, and friendlier than he needed to be. He read very well, with the audience gradually growing accustomed to his unpredictable stammer. The literary conversation that followed was full of angles like a good game of squash. And so it continues. I want to wish this complicated man and superlative poet a happy 80th birthday. It is high time I thanked him for his poems and for his devotion to the craft, ‘a hand ceaselessly /combing and stroking /the landscape.’”
A Distant Echo
for John Montague on his 80th birthday
Garvaghey, a rough field,
Dungannon and Armagh
remember the O’Neills
before the Tudor armies
trampled bog and sheugh.
We revel in that stuff
– still relevant enough
as our own new century
crushes the wild contours
of the ancestral dream.
Earth-movers champ and cough
at ancient glen and stream.
Same story everywhere,
the old St-Germain
market and Super-Cannes
a corporate nightmare
while a bard holds aloof
under the leaking roof
of a dark house in Schull.
A killer roams the hills
but Muses mind with love
the hierophantic cave.
The ceol mór of long ago
lives on as a distant echo
drowned out by the noise
of ambient retail rock;
but the poet makes his soul
as only he can make
in a great singing school
of heather and wild dog rose.
DEREK MAHON
(Published by the Gallery Press)