POETRY:IN 2009, TO CELEBRATE his 80th birthday, the Gallery Press published a refreshing variation on the standard Selected Poemsby way of tribute to John Montague's long career. Chosen Lightscrowd-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).
MONTAGUE'S CHRIST would not be out of place in John F Deane's new book, which returns to the territory he has staked out over the past fertile decade. The fine opening poem of Eye of the Hare(Carcanet, 100pp, £9.95), Travelling Man, situates the poet in transit, at the centre of a web that stretches backwards and forwards to points in space and time, noting his immediate airport environment as quickly as his island upbringing and future flight, "men in hard hats, yellow orange blue, with trucks and JCBs and such // chaos everywhere you would wonder if there could be / anyone in charge. / An Exxon Mobil aviation-fuel truck went by; // I heard its thundering through the thick glass window, / felt the floor / shuddering and I thought // of the earthedness of islands".
The poem is typical of Deane's late style: enjambed and rapid, grounded in concrete details but allegorically minded, the poet's perspective becoming somehow godlike, "in charge", as the poem takes off. Another highlight is the exultant and very different Mimizan Plage. Eye of the Hareis notable, in fact, for its loose-limbed energy and variety, including, for example, three strikingly different long poems: one narrative, Weeds and Wilderness, and two more meditative sequences, Body Partsand Achill: The Island.
A number of Deane's poems' zesty descriptions of their situations are, however, triangulated too readily to particular points about theology and ecology. Deane has considered, in his critical essays and his poems, the difficulties of writing out of a commitment to particular ideas. Some poems find him, affectingly, "again bereft and at a loss for words" ( Who Have Gone Before) or identifying with "the island shoemaker . . . one / in a guild with swallows and the blooming haw" ( Shoemaker), but sometimes the freewheeling tumble of the work takes a short cut to arrive at an already established position, or swamps us with references, as when Abundanceruns together Peter, James and John with George Herbert and"old grumpy Abraham". And the Christian framework takes on a disconcerting edge when the poems, full of pity and terror as they are, connect the Old Testament ("Under the violent heart of Yahweh / the compassionate heart of the Christ" ( Paris) to the Israeli state and its war on Palestine and "the blood-stained building blocks of Gaza" ( The Colours).
THERE IS ALSO an avowedly political dimension to Bernard O’Donoghue’s Farmers Cross (Faber, 55pp, £9.99). Flocks and Companies transcribes birdsong and begins, “At first I thought the birds were singletons”, but the sonnet ends somewhere else entirely, “But I saw what he was sent for, what he was warning, / when the first ordnance descended on Fallujah”. Mere Planter and Fior-Ghael, likewise, shifts from its account of a meitheal to the scientist David Kelly, “that public servant with an Irish name”. Zooming in on Allied involvement in Iraq, O’Donoghue yokes together very different and particular private moments to a public event, a conceit that would not be out of place in recent Muldoon.
Elsewhere, Farmers Cross elegises individuals and the larger cultures that disappear with them. While Rubbish Theory ponders the usefulness of his poems' conservative impulse ("the rule is that things must first pass through / a season of neglect during which they're thrown out / as rubbish, in order to become scarce enough / to be worth collecting") , O'Donoghue, like Montague and Deane, does collect and value unregarded family histories: subtle individual portraits are accompanied and deepened by longer versions of the Anglo-Saxon poem The Wandererand an extract from the Middle English poem Piers Plowman, which explicitly lament a disappearing culture and morally censure the "new", emerging generations.
O'Donoghue's versions, and original poems, are uniformly flat and unemphatic in their vocabulary. How, then, do they develop their undeniable narrative power? His subjects, death and ruin, might benefit from his low-key approach, but it is his spring-loaded syntax that propels us towards the scenes of heartbreak and sense of loss, the glimpse and last look that his poems so often and effectively describe. Dingleis typical, a miraculously condensed register of what happened – and what might have happened but didn't. It begins, "They'd promised a fine summer from the start: / the dolphins, they said, had shoaled into the bay"; then we see the poet in his "Gaeltacht digs, reading novels, / eating oranges and waiting for the rain / to stop" before it ends:
But as we stood
seeking out formulas and metaphors
for how the dashed spray poured back down
into the depths off the faces of the gravestone-granite
rocks, something changed. And the next morning
we read in the local paper that the dolphins
had unexpectedly gone back out to sea.
John McAuliffe's third book, Of All Places, just out from the Gallery Press, is a Poetry Book Society recommendation for the autumn. He teaches poetry at the centre for new writing at the University of Manchester