Montague’s sequence of eight poems was written in the dark aftermath of the composer Seán Ó Riada’s death, aged forty, on the 3rd of October 1971, and the traumatic Bloody Sunday killings of the following January in Derry.
One Sunday morning in the preceding July I had met Ó Riada in Cúil Aodha, where he directed his own beautifully ethnic setting of the community Mass (one of his finest legacies). Afterwards, at the house, Ruth had a welcoming table and the children, prattling in Irish, romped with an Irish wolfhound in and out and around the garden. Musicians, including John Kelly the Clare fiddler and concertina player, struck up. Ó Riada was his charismatic self, with beverages, including poteen, liberally on offer.
On that summer morning of open house in Cúil Aodha, who could have believed that he would be dead by the autumn? Coming in early October, that was like the going down of a chieftain, with fell death suddenly thrusting the teenage Peadar Ó Riada into his father’s place at the organ for the funeral. On the national news the burial procession resembled Greek tragedy: the throng of mourners, local and national; Ruth, veiled in black (and soon to follow after) with the cluster of small children; Seán Clárach Mac Domhnaill’s Jacobite anthem ‘Mo Ghile Mear’ chanted in the deep-grained timbre of Cúil Aodha voices, and the fiddler John Kelly’s comment by the graveside: He lifted us all up.
John Montague was amongst those shouldering the coffin. Like other poets, including Kinsella, Heaney and Seán Lucy, he would commemorate the composer, of whom he has recently written: ‘few men have had as direct an effect on my life …’ Their friendship included the occasional locking of antlers. Ó Riada, with a touch of arrogance and a quasi-aristocratic style to match, was a volatile man of brilliant talents — composer, writer and film-maker, performer, broadcaster, cultural visionary and crusader — his iconoclastic lance always at an extreme angle. Though emotionally wounded in childhood, Montague was, and is, a more measured and urbane man, with a self-preserving instinct for the middle way, better fitted for the long haul. Ó Riada’s sensibility included a streak of fatalism, borne out by death at forty, and that preceded by the fear that his creative gift seemed to have run dry.
That compounded pall overhangs ‘Ó Riada’s Farewell’, named after the composer’s last recording, from Claddagh Records, the company which Montague had helped found with Garech Browne. That enterprise was a significant cultural nexus; so also was Ó Riada’s with Gael Linn. Garech Browne’s support was reminiscent of great house patronage from an earlier age, and the Montague sequence invokes images of Carolan. In the end it was Garech Browne who rushed Ó Riada to King’s College Hospital in London in a vain attempt to save him. Other circumstantial context of the Ó Riada pieces is found in Montague’s recent volume of memoir, The Pear Is Ripe.
The loss of friends — Sgarúint na gCompánach — is a universal marker on the human journey, and haunts all poets in time. Montague’s sequence for Ó Riada is more than elegy however. It touches on terror and despair, reaching for some of its potency into the deep but broken Gaelic world. In ‘Samhain’ he references Aogán Ó Rathaille’s great aisling Gile na Gile (Brightness of Brightness) but inverts it: ‘Darkness of Darkness / we meet on our way / in loneliness …’
Yet the world turns. Montague survives to twice Ó Riada’s span. Blessed with an unfailing gift and a steady compass, he’s made four score sun-circuits and gathered in a plenteous harvest of the spirit and the word.