‘There is no hawk among my friends. / Swiftly they cruise their chosen air …’ The opening lines of John Montague’s ‘Division’ move to an unmistakably Roethkean beat, absorbing the ‘Yeats in the speakeasy’ quality for which Montague praises the American poet in his memoir Company. Fittingly enough for a poem of its title, ‘Division’ comes in two parts and stakes out an intermediary space, between the human and the avian. There is more than a little ambiguity as the poem’s first part develops as to who its ‘they’ might be. ‘Cruelty is not their way of life’, Montague writes, and if we are still talking of hawks the raptor-fancier author of ‘Hawk Roosting’ (‘My manners are tearing off heads’) might beg to differ; and if of the poet’s friends, they end up inconveniently sprouting a ‘fernlike talon’. I presume, then, that Montague intends something in between, a man-bird hybrid (the next poem from A Chosen Light — in the Collected Poems at least — features that archetypal man-bird King Sweeney, and another example, Fintan from The Book of Invasions, turns up in a Mount Eagle poem, ‘Survivor’).
The poem’s second section takes an inward turn. In ‘Night Crow’, Roethke felt an avian presence ‘Deep in the brain, far back’, just as in Beckett’s ‘The Vulture’ the bird drags ‘his hunger through the sky / of my skull’. For Montague, ‘There are days when the head is / A bitter, predatory thing’. He takes a gamble on his use of abstract nouns (‘It is a chill sensuality / Which outdistances cruelty / As though destruction were / A releasing element //Down which the mind patrols’) before allowing the poem its solving, scattering resolution:
But sometimes when it sails
Too swift, between the wings’ pause,
I know that my own best life
Is the hypnotized fieldmouse
Housed beneath its claws.
Over half a century and more Montague has explored the theme of division and self-division, speaking through the grafted second tongue of American exile and return. Yet for all the sombreness of self-alienation, civil discord or marital strife, it is obvious that Montague’s greatest tests, as subject matter, provide the basis for how his poetry functions at its most exacting, urgent and true. ‘Division’ articulates a poetics whose speaker is both bird and human, hawk and prey, self and other. As Montague’s readers we may hitch a ride on his raptor currents or clutch like fieldmice at the earth, but cannot escape the pull of this many-minded art, serving an elemental need that, like Beckett’s vulture, will not come to rest ‘till hunger earth and sky be offal’.