I remember going with Macdara to hear John Montague read in the Physics Theatre in Earlsfort Terrace on the occasion of the launching of his Collected Poems: the old lecture-hall wooden, darkly marked with time. The first sight of the book: handsome, austere-looking black and white photography cover, the poet on a country road though not in winter, stretching into what might be an autumnal version of the landscape of ‘Border Sick Call’.

John in person looking serious, not austere, read the poem and his voice with its slight faltering tremble, as of something made up of fragments settling, led us confidently into a world collapsing. As the uncertain textures circled us like ravens — of makeshift shacks, of snow and ice as implacable barrier, of the boundaries of small farms and empires fading duskily to nothing — there was a getting to grips:

… the so solid scrunch

and creak of snow crystals …

It was a journey of surprises: how the place of the poet’s doctor, brother, companion, is gradually revealed, the initial refusal of the Dantesque Purgatory (which will reappear later in the vision of the icebound boat, like a cameo seal, defining, telling us that we have been where we didn’t mean to go):

… no purgatorial journey

reads stranger than this,

our Ulster border pilgrimage

where demarcations disappear,

landmarks, forms, and farms vanish

into the ultimate coldness of an ice age,

as we march towards Lettercran,

in steelblue, shadowless light …

The name of the townland is one sure thing, with its literal meaning that salutes the actuality of the landscape and dismisses allegory. History is happening in the literal, with its momentary explosions, and its linguistic and geological time; it is also literary history, recalling Patrick Kavanagh’s affection for the border smugglers’ country of Monaghan, and Montague’s own ‘Like dolmens round my childhood’ where ‘curate and doctor trudged’ to attend the aged and isolated. Another surprise: in the cold of this poem there is warmth at the centre, unlike Kavanagh’s lonely satire. The travellers bring help, they come as brothers. The house the travellers find is a home of marriage and hospitality, of endurance into old age, of the fire laughing, the dog mannerly suppressing its instinctive growl. The brothers get poitín, and stories that go back to the Táin Bó Cuailnge.

If at first we saw the poem as a glittering snowy presence, its light and colour John Montague’s favourite monochrome, its surface reflecting scraps of the landscape of Irish poetry (and prose, and translation) of its time, we could also hear in it echoes that prompted listening for another note, the noise of geological time which speaks in the poet’s ear often at the most human moments:

But more turns of narrative, as satisfactory as a romance revelation, awaited: the vision of the boat in the descent, the sudden gracious intrusion of the hare, before the doctor’s grim account of rural death, his almost proverbial summation ‘the real border is not between / countries, but between life and death’.

There is another border in the poem, between the known and the mystery. Of the navicella the poet asks ‘Why could I not see it on the way / up, only on the journey home’, and leaves the word ‘home’ twanging like a question to match the acceptance of limit in the final section: