John Montague is a poet of love and loss. Exploring the ‘rough field’ of his home ground, he uncovers ‘shards of a lost tradition’ everywhere: battles bring defeat and earls take flight (‘Disappearance & death / of a world’); the native language comes under threat; a time-honoured way of life is ‘going, going, GONE’. Arranged inventively as a ‘Loss and Gain’ account, the poem ‘Balance Sheet’ presents Montague both as subtle celebrant of nature and trenchant satirist of so-called progress. That even love is stalked by potential loss was a lesson reinforced for the young Montague when — becoming reacquainted with his mother, who had abandoned him as a child — he was admonished not to visit her: ‘I start to get fond of you, John, / and then you are up and gone.’
‘Crossroads’, one of two Montague poems from the 1990s which share the Mahlerian title ‘Kindertotenlieder’, is a profound and troubled rumination on the nature of loss itself. The warning shot triggered by the opening line’s ‘dead silence’, the ominous early glimpse of a churchyard, and the reference to ‘the elements for tragedy’ prepare us to expect the worst. Anecdotal its tone may be, but this poem is not simply an atmospheric evocation of a childhood incident from the 1930s. Montague has deeper ambitions; something suspenseful — even chilling — lurks in the airless, thunder-smelling heat and desiccated landscape (parched stream, dust-furred flowers, limp leaves) as they presage the lightning bolt about to strike at the heart of a rural Tyrone community.
What strikes, actually, is a speeding car and what it collides with is a schoolboy who has freewheeled ‘down / Garvaghey’s long incline // to swoop out into / the middle of the crossroads’. Montague does not linger ghoulishly over the carnage, as the ‘mangled body’ of his schoolmate is ‘gathered / away into an ambulance’. Nor is any attempt made to describe the victim, identified only as ‘young MacDonald’. The bare facts deliver their own raw truths concerning the tragedy, news of which ‘crackles like gorsefire’ through the torpid countryside (that inspired flash of gorsefire brilliantly suggests not only the swiftness with which word spreads but also the randomness, rapidity and destructiveness of the accident itself). As relief settles over the poet’s family (‘Thank God, you’re safe’), disbelief and devastation will be visited on the family whose son has been so abruptly and needlessly snatched away.
In ‘Crossroads’, as in Robert Frost’s ‘Out, Out—’, a lucid, unsensational diction conveys, with buzz saw sharpness, the enormity of the tragedy and heightens the reader’s awareness of the baffling arbitrariness of fate; the fragility with which the boundary line between life and death is drawn. The crossroads, where paths diverge and choices are made, presents its own balance sheet of loss and gain: ‘take a left turn, and / land in the dungeon // (or the right, and love / the lovely princess …)’. Although Montague is far from reconciled to the dark knowledge he gleaned as a schoolboy (the memory of the wrong turn taken by ‘young MacDonald’ seems to have haunted the poet for sixty years), the poem is something of a reconciliation account. Impossible though it is to fully comprehend any tragedy, enigma is resolved into image, as ‘the taped / and chalk-measured / scene of an accident’ becomes — aptly, heartbreakingly and unforgettably — ‘a problem abandoned / on a school blackboard’.