Something I’ve always admired in Montague’s work is the way he insists on a slow, close, patient looking at things most of us might flinch from. He looks, and keeps looking, until he finds an adequately specific language for the object under his attention. ‘Peer closely,’ he instructs himself (and us) in one poem, ‘All those small / scarlet petals are shivering.’ He will not turn away from hard matters, but insists — with a mixture of fascination, sympathy, and what might be called rapt detachment — on seeing exactly what’s there and then saying it in a manner that’s both plain and at the same time ritualistic — formalized by line and stanza into a fixed ritual instant. It’s heartening to note that in his latest work Montague has lost nothing of this courage and capacity, this willingness to look at and look into things, and to speak a materially exact and emotionally exacting truth about them, about their nature and the nature of the world as he finds it. For me the most lyrically satisfying version of this in Drunken Sailor occurs in the opening poem of the collection, ‘White Water’.
In the first stanza of this poem it’s the word ‘skin’ that holds my attention, bringing both factual and metaphorical levels into alignment. What the speaker sees is a feeling body. Then the difficult circumstance of the boat’s existence is acknowledged, the way it manages what both supports and opposes it — the sea swell it ‘rolls and responds to’. That the swell is ‘harsh’ accentuates feeling as part of the picture.
This presence of physical feeling continues in the second stanza: ‘ribs’ looks back to ‘skin’, insists on rendering the inanimate boat animate, an animation that testifies to the poet’s willingness to get very close to the fact he scrutinizes. Then this body — both actual and metaphorical — is seen as the site of a ‘slithering frenzy’ of fish, the poet’s eye getting closer as it moves through the mass of ‘flailing mackerel’ to the single ‘gasping sea trout’. The poem’s language behaves like a camera developing a scene from panning shot to close-up — the eye in unblinking action. The language prompts us to feel what is seen.
In the third stanza, then, the visual morphs into the visionary, as the imagination leaps beyond the physical into a metaphysical observation, a consideration of how death and brilliance are inextricably linked. Unconsciously evoking a line of Wallace Stevens (‘death is the mother of beauty’), Montague’s speaker-seer notes the gleam of the dying fish, summarizing the paradox with an oxymoron: ‘putrescent glitter’.
Finally — leaving its triggering, sharply seen, material occasion behind — the poem amplifies (like a wave reaching shore) to its largest implication, having learned from its close focus on some physically disturbing facts a larger truth. This final compelling formulation, anchored in an image, enlarges our understanding of the otherwise unspeakable fusion of approaching death with a given visionary intensity: ‘that light in the narrows / before a storm breaks’.
Enough to add, by way of conclusion, that this habit of Montague’s reveals the overarching aesthetic of his verse to be a mix of the visual and the metaphysical. Video ergo sum — I see therefore I am — whatever the cost. For this brave, self-sustaining poet, a diamond clarity of seeing is, I’d hazard, as close as he can come to faith: if all things glow when they’re seen as closely as he insists on seeing them, then that is ‘vision’ in both senses. And I wonder if this obsessive seeing might be connected with the poet’s childhood sense of being seen by Christ, as this appears in ‘Scraping the Pot’, a poem about early Confession experiences. In it, the child’s experience of Christ looking at him — mediated by the country phrase for Confession as ‘scraping the pot’ — evolves into a state of privileged seeing: ‘I saw my neighbours’ souls / hanging above the hearth, / scoured and gleaming.’ Being visible and vulnerable, he pushes back by means of his own calamitous (and ‘confessional’) clarity of seeing. At the very centre of Montague’s tirelessly vigilant imagination, then, shines this clarity of sight-becoming-insight, vision becoming visionary — a marvellous, marvel-making force that for all these years has won the admiration, affection and gratitude of so many of us.