SINCE HE emerged with that generation of poets who strode out from the shadow cast by Yeats over half a century ago, John Montague has been a much admired, singular presence in Irish poetry; more than that he has been a touchstone for other poets, a seminal influence on the course of contemporary poetry here.
The American poet CK Williams once remarked about Montague that “there is a tendency to take his really quite remarkable achievement for granted”. On the occasion of his 80th birthday this week, that achievement truly deserves the attention and eulogising it will receive. The best of his work – and different adjudicators will make their different choices – belongs to world literature as much as to our local literary canon.
In his sequence, The Rough Field, his re-imagining of Ireland’s historical and cultural legacy in which he hacked back to the roots of more recent conflicts and surveyed the distant past in conjunction with personal and contemporary history, he has rendered great service. Always ready to speak his mind, much of his poetry has been fashioned out of the contours of his native Ulster; his knowledge of that province runs deep and wide.
This most cosmopolitan of poets has also known – to borrow the title of an early collection – “forms of exile”: in Iowa, in Berkeley and in Paris. From early on, his affinities were as much with the poets of America and France as with those from his own tradition.
His voice as a poet is a quiet one, but it is one of consistent clarity and always compelling in whatever he has to say, whether the subject is exile, identity, a lost tradition or love, a recurrent theme in some of his most accomplished lyrics, or nature and the environment: Montague was our eco-poet long before that topic moved up the agenda of mainstream concerns.
His poetry will not be his only legacy; as an inspirational teacher in University College Cork for many years, he nurtured the talents of a group of younger writers. There are many, on both sides of the Atlantic, who owe gratitude to his gifts as a teacher. Readers of this newspaper’s books pages will be familiar with his erudite, insightful and anecdotally-rich reviews.
After a lifetime devoted to his art, during which his work has accumulated into the remarkable achievement referred to by CK Williams, the renewed recognition he will receive in the coming days has been well earned. May he continue, as he has always done, to give us verse that is: The only way of saying something
Luminously as possible.