Reading ‘Paths’ in Poetry some ten years ago brought on the sort of ‘take me back’ attack that can easily turn an ex-pat to youtubing Van Morrison or googling for a ruin in Leitrim. It is not just Montague’s unfolding and unfussy prosody that makes the correspondance visceral — sin sin or sin é, as my father would have said in a gardening moment, the pea and bean rigs staked, say, the lettuce and radish beds raked — but the poem’s immediate accessibility, its Whitmanesque invitation to ‘trace small paths’ by the poet’s side and glimpse, maybe, in the mirror, a promise on which the poem delivers.
But not before the poet gets out of the poem’s way of navigating us along these paths. Here, we are off-grid in Montague kingdom with a young, would-be Nebuchadnezzar who walks us through the two gardens — first the flower, then the vegetable — of his Garvaghey boyhood, ‘the front / for beauty, the back / for use’. Contrastive as the enterprise is, however, beauty and bounty are hardly exclusive, and there is as much blooming going on out the back in the potager as there is utility (nay re-utility) out front in the potato boiler and black pot. That sweetpea conceals ‘the goats’ tarred shack / which stank’ no more effectively than the lilac screens an outside world of comparable husbandry. It is an incredibly busy poem. No space, not even the paths with their ‘shards of painted delph’, seems left unfilled, the poet mapping forth in a particular, near-precious fashion, not afraid to go anthropomorphic on the vegetables, the wonderfully accurate ‘broad beans / plumping their cushions’ and, equally so, ‘a frailty of parsley’. Later in the poem, it is no surprise that ‘flowers pluck’ at the narrator’s coat. There’s no need really, and no room anyway, for everything to get away from itself (literally if not rhetorically), for it is a highly peopled and animaled poem too: old Lynch and ‘his carroty sons’; the perfectly metonymous ‘cheeping balls of fluff’; the ‘marauding cat’, ‘hungry vixen’ and ‘small guardian’ narrator, each left bereft of trope. Much of the achievement of the poem lies in that counterbalance of figurative and literal such that, for all its high-occupancy, the poem gets a move on, listing easily, unclaustrophobically, towards its apotheosis, with ample head-room for the reader. No stanza feels too dense. The short lines and fragments help too, and only a poet of Montague’s earned nerve can open a stanza with ‘With, …’ and ‘Then, …’
The larger guardian, of course, of the gardens and the narrator, is Aunt Winifred, mentioned at the outset, returned to at the end. It would be easy to declare ‘Paths’ essential Montague, meditative, attentive, sacral, that ‘growing whine of cars’ whinge tricking us back to the ’70s. The gardens, however — with their wires, tar and oil-fed incubator — are hardly prelapsarian. What I admire, and what will bring me back to it, now that I keep Smashing the Piano within bedside reach, is not the nostalgia for an untroubled past but the discovery of an untroubled present. What lament there is is muted by that something quietly transformative occurring at the end, memory muddling youth and age, sleeplessness becoming trance. There’s no need to make sense; a little blur makes perfect sense, narrator and aunt by turns returned to boy- and girlhood. Just as the gardens of beauty and use are written on his aunt’s hands, at once ‘calloused’ and ‘tender’, memory translates absence into presence, empty to plenty, then to now, and then the other way about, delivering experience of its weight.