Poetry:
Forms of Exile, 1958
Poisoned Lands, and Other Poems, 1961 (revised as Poisoned Lands, 1977)
A Chosen Light, 1967
Tides, 1970
The Rough Field, 1972, revised 1989
A Slow Dance, 1975
The Great Cloak, 1978
Selected Poems, 1982
The Dead Kingdom, 1984
Mount Eagle, 1988
New Selected Poems, 1989
About Love, 1993
Time in Armagh, 1993
Collected Poems, 1995
Chain Letter, 1997
Smashing the Piano, 1999
Long Fiction:
The Lost Notebook, 1987
Short Fiction:
Death of a Chieftain, and Other Stories, 1964 (revised as An Occasion of Sin: Stories, 1992)
A Love Present, and Other Stories, 1997
Translations:
A Fair House: Versions of Irish Poetry, 1973 (from Irish)
November: A Choice of Translations from André Frénaud, 1977 (with Evelyn Robson)
Selected Poems, 1994 (of Francis Ponge; with C. K. Williams and Margaret Guiton)
Carnac, 1999 (of Eugène Guillevic)
Nonfiction:
The Figure in the Cave, and Other Essays, 1989
Myth, History, and Literary Tradition, 1989 (with Thomas Kinsella and Brendan Kennelly)
Company: A Chosen Life, 2001
Edited Texts:
The Dolmen Miscellany of Irish Writing, 1962
The Faber Book of Irish Verse, 1974 (The Book of Irish Verse, 1976)
Bitter Harvest: An Anthology of Contemporary Irish Verse, 1989
Miscellaneous:
Born in Brooklyn: John Montague’s America, 1991 (poetry, short fiction, and nonfiction)
John Patrick Montague (MAHNT-uh-gyew) was born in Brooklyn of Irish parents, but he and his two older brothers were sent to live in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, when he was four. He was separated from his brothers and raised by two aunts in Garvaghey. His mother returned to Ireland when he was seven, but he seldom saw her or his brothers (he was twenty-three when his father finally returned to Ireland).
John Montague
Montague attended local schools, then St. Patrick’s College, Armagh, as a boarding student (1941-1946). He went to University College, Dublin, receiving a B.A. in English and history in 1949, an M.A. in Anglo-Irish literature in 1952. In the late 1940’s, he began to write and publish poems and to travel in France and other European countries. He returned to the United States in 1953, studied at Yale University, Indiana University, the University of Iowa, and the University of California at Berkeley, earning an M.F.A. at Iowa in 1955. During these years, he met and was influenced by many American writers, from Robert Penn Warren and William Carlos Williams to Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg. He married in 1956 and returned to Ireland, where he worked for three years for the Irish tourist board in Dublin.
The title of his first book of poems, Forms of Exile, announces a major theme and explores variations on it: separation, alienation, dispossession, loss. Montague both affirms his Irishness and distances himself from repressive aspects of Irish Catholicism. His second book, Poisoned Lands, and Other Poems, reprinted poems from the first and added others. Most sift through one or another of several pasts: personal, familial, regional, national, cultural.
Montague spent much of the 1960’s in Paris, where he worked for two years as a journalist. He also taught at universities in the United States, Ireland, and France, took on editorial projects, wrote short stories, and continued to write poems. His marriage broke up, and he met the woman who would become his second wife (a Frenchwoman, like his first wife).
Montague’s next two volumes of poems, A Chosen Light and Tides, introduce an array of love poems as well as poems about his father (who had died in 1959) and other family members and (especially the earlier volume) poems which draw on memories from childhood.
Montague began work in the early 1960’s on The Rough Field, his best-known book. Its title is a translation of Garvaghey, where he grew up, and the local landscape is a continual point of reference. The volume weaves memories and stories from his family and from Irish history into a complex, unified tapestry, many of the darker tones in which derive from–and respond to–the violence which broke out in Northern Ireland during the late 1960’s.
Married again in 1972, Montague settled in Cork, where he would teach at the university until 1988 and where his daughters would be born in 1973 and 1979. A Slow Dance commingles warmth and cold, life and death, celebrating the one, lamenting (without flinching from) the other. The Great Cloak, a rich compendium of love poems, examines the demise of one relationship and the growth of another.
Montague’s mother died in 1973, and The Dead Kingdom is loosely organized on the thread of his trip home to the North of Ireland to bury her. The poems that deal directly with his mother find him working through what he calls the “primal hurt,” feeling himself “an unwanted child.” His next volume, Mount Eagle, more miscellaneous in its contents, achieves a more serene note, especially in a number of nature poems.
The 1980’s and 1990’s produced retrospectives of various kinds, including two general selections of his poems, plus an impressive theme-based selection (About Love) and the magisterial Collected Poems. Smashing the Piano, the follow-up to Collected Poems, contains forty-one poems, several of them sequences of lyrics. Time in Armagh, a gathering of new work, is retrospective in a different sense: It looks back to the poet’s schooldays in Armagh during World War II.
Montague’s best work, often pertaining to Ireland and its history, his family and its history, and his own personal history, and to combinations of these, has established him in the first rank of English-speaking poets of his era.