It’s not every poet who can back a Clydesdale into a poem. John Montague not only gets one effortlessly into ‘The Forge’, he then seems to step just far enough away to allow the horse to draw up into an impressive and marvellous physicality.
As readers, we may walk into his forge behind Montague, but then he stands, as it were, alongside us, so that what the poem shows seems to happen directly in front of us as an unmediated and spontaneous event. The shoeing of the horse is nicely described, with most of the energy invested in those wisely chosen verbs.
John Montague is the consummate observer, always on the lookout for the giveaway detail. So much hinges on ‘hugely fretful’ with its strategic adverb/adjective combination that conjures up a horse that is bristling and restless, and yet unable to break free into the comparative release of one true verb.
That verb, when it comes in the final line, is manipulated with tremendous force and drama. Now a firm nudge requires us to shift our consideration away from the horse and onto the poet. The nostril-dilated horse and the singing bellows cede to another kind of breath — the life-force of language, the stress and echo of the verb ‘to forge’. That the verb is fastened onto the poem’s cusp, where it rings with the clarity and authority of the horseshoe itself, indicates a poet who knows how to work the language to achieve the desired effect.
The only forge I ever entered was a one-roomed, half-doored, drystone shed near Furbo in County Galway where my father took me when I was six or so. I have a clear image of it even now, how pools of musk and darkness seemed to stand like silent horses in the corners of the room; how the fire had a kind of personality that made us listen to it and watch its every move. It was an intriguing and yet comforting place with its steady rhythms and unknowable, livid fire. The building is still there, just about, roofless, unlit and long since covered in ivy, with a local hotel’s billboard fixed to the Galway side. ‘The Forge’ brought it back to me; the apron, the bellows, the anvil, the clamour of fire and thrumming work. I had forgotten I remembered it until I read this poem. The ‘dead iron’ in the opening line isn’t long being struck into life by the practised hand of this poet. The ‘real’ forge, which is every forge (including my own remembered one), becomes an emblematic space where the resonance of language hammers home. That this is achieved with such apparent effortlessness confirms what we already know from so many John Montague poems: that his steady hand wrestles language to calmness, and that his is a dedicated, wise, ample and forceful gift.