‘The poet who survives is the one to celebrate, the human being who confronts darkness and defeats it is the one to admire.’ By Donald Hall’s yardstick John Montague, on the occasion of his 80th birthday (28 February 2009), more than half a century after the publication of Forms of Exile, has earned a right to our applause.
We at The Gallery Press have been publishing John’s poetry since 1988, following his long alliance with Liam Miller and Dolmen Press. Collected Poems (1995) was the first apogee of our association. I wrote then of it, his life’s work to that point: ‘part self-portrait, it is even more a “landscape with figures” — and it has the look of a masterpiece’. Since then we have published two new collections and we discuss others, including a round-up of his French translations.
Frequently Festschrifts remain tied to their occasion so, to mark the milestone of John’s birthday, we decided to invite an assembly of poets who have published books with The Gallery Press to select one of his poems and to outline a claim for its worth in their estimation and affection. There was an immediate and enthusiastic welcome for the idea. To discover, in particular, young poets’ first encounters with poems and/or collections was both enlightening and corroborative. (We regret that a number of John’s peers, despite their best wishes, felt unable to participate.)
I wondered if certain phases of the work — early? middle? recent? — or, indeed, if the ‘greatest hits’ would attract or inhibit responses. Our book offers evidence that John Montague has admirers of all ages for all stages and registers of his work. It is a remarkable testimony that the essays respond to poems from each of his published collections.
Individual choices seem both uncanny and natural — Michael Longley’s of ‘Windharp’, with its ‘heatherbells and ferns’, a poem I imagine he’d be proud to have written himself; Eavan Boland’s of ‘A Lost Tradition’; Ciaran Carson’s of ‘The Country Fiddler’; or Michael Coady’s (with his passion for music) of ‘O Riada’s Farewell’. Derek Mahon gravitated towards one of John’s ‘eco-poems’, Frank McGuinness to one that embraces a theme of Ibsen’s, while the most recent conscript to Gallery’s list, Ciaran Berry who now lives in New York, attends to ‘A Graveyard in Queens’.
Chosen Lights could be called a democratically determined Selected Poems. It is a book which provides insight into a plethora of poets’ methods and interests and a storehouse of critical insight and personal remembrance. Above all, we hope it serves to honour an artist of uncommon dedication and ambition, a maker of enduring poems. It’s long since some of his lines and phrases entered the consciousness of Ireland. We salute a poet who is, as Eamon Grennan concludes, ‘a marvellous, marvel-making force that for all these years has won the admiration, affection and gratitude of so many of us’.
Peter Fallon