John Montague obituary

Those who enjoy the Chieftains may not realise that the band took their name from a collection of short stories, Death of a Chieftain (1964), by the Irish poet John Montague, who has died aged 87.

Anyone who heard Montague himself performing, however, is quite likely to recollect what the poet Derek Mahon called his “mythical stammer”. This struggle to express himself, to find words for the ineffable or the unspeakable (as in the poem about an attempted rape, The Wild Dog Rose) is crucial to his often autobiographical work. If the bogs were an adequate symbol of the Troubles for Seamus Heaney, 10 years his junior, Montague dipped his hands in a more “fluid sensual dream”, deeper into Yeatsian archetypes.

He was a master of dinnseanchas or “place wisdom”, finding music in “place names that sigh / like a pressed melodeon / across this forgotten / Northern landscape”, but conscious of his own placelessness, as suggested in the rather Jungian title poem of Mount Eagle (1989) – almost an anagram of his own name. It is no surprise that one of his essays was on Oliver Goldsmith’s pastoral poem The Deserted Village, which he considered deeply Irish, “a protest against the Enclosure Acts”. In his own much anthologised poem Like Dolmens Round My Childhood, the Old People (published in The Rough Field, 1972), after describing characters from his youth, he eventually harrumphs: “Ancient Ireland, indeed! I was reared by her bedside.”

In fact, Montague was born in Brooklyn, New York, during the depression (a year younger than Mickey Mouse, he would joke), the son of Irish Catholics recently emigrated. Although sent back home, along with his brothers, Seamus and Turlough, at the age of four by his sick mother, Molly (nee Carney), in his poetry he clings to those first years – her “flowering absence”; the misery of his father, James, in his brother’s speakeasy, or caged in “his grille / in the Clark Street IRT”.

Both parents had been active in Ireland during the border turmoil of 1916, the area where young John would grow up. Although separated from his brothers on arrival in Northern Ireland in 1933, he came to regard the seven years he spent with two unmarried aunts on their farm in Garvaghey, County Tyrone, “as a blessing”. Garvaghey, the so-called “rough field”, would provide material and the title for his most celebrated book, an extended (and illustrated) dramatisation of “a kind of vision” he had had while sitting on a bus, of “my home area, the unhappiness of its historical destiny”.

After attending Garvaghey and then Glencull primary schools, and avoiding the priesthood at St Patrick’s College, Armagh (“religion did fascinate me [but] … girls were constantly on my mind”), he went to University College Dublin, where loneliness, desire and the presence of figures including the poet and critic Anthony Cronin led him to verse. A Fulbright scholarship to Yale in 1953, then stints at Iowa (where he met his first wife, Madeleine de Brauer) and Berkeley, brought him in to contact with the American poetic style.

When The Rough Field appeared almost two decades later (by which time he was heading for Cork, settling there with his second wife, Evelyn Robson, and their two daughters, Oonagh and Sibyl, and becoming a magnetic presence at the university), he had already published Forms of Exile (1958), Poisoned Lands (1961), A Chosen Light (1967) and Tides (1971). Many of these were beautiful Dolmen Press editions, as were A Slow Dance (1975) and The Great Cloak (1978), the latter an arrestingly erotic collection. But, significantly, when it eventually came to a Collected Poems (1995, expanded 2012), Montague opened it with the full text of his Ulster sequence.

For all its notoriety and political heft – perhaps because of it – The Rough Field had nothing like the enduring effect of Heaney’s 1975 collection North. Nor did a string of subsequent volumes, such as The Dead Kingdom (1984), or the late masterpiece Border Sick Call, which closes the first edition of the Collected Poems, and tells movingly of visiting his doctor brother’s rural patients during a snowstorm.

Despite a vigorous final period – Smashing the Piano (1999), Drunken Sailor (2004), Speech Lessons (2011) and Second Childhood (due to be published in February 2017) – and the enviable succession of selected volumes (from Oxford University Press, 1982, Bloodaxe, 1990 and Penguin, 2001) – Montague aways seemed to be overlooked, overshadowed by those who influenced him, including his drinking companion and fellow walker Samuel Beckett, and those – like Heaney or Eavan Boland – whom he influenced.

Apart from stories, essays (The Figure in the Cave, 1989) and autobiographical writings (Company, 2001; The Pear is Ripe, 2007), Montague also edited The Faber Book of Irish Verse (1974), featuring many of his translations.

He was involved with the founding of Claddagh Records, which publishes traditional artists and leading literary figures in Ireland. The label released a number of recordings of Montague’s work, including a 1973 live performance of The Rough Field, at the Roundhouse in London, with music by the Chieftains.

He was much honoured in Ireland, becoming the first holder of the Ireland Chair of Poetry in 1998, and in the US too, and his personality seemed particularly well adapted to life in France. His first two wives were both French and he translated the French poets Claude Esteban, Philippe Jaccottet and Eugène Guillevic.

Montague was made a chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur in 2010. In his latter years, he and his third wife, the novelist Elizabeth Wassell, whom he married in 2005, divided their time between an apartment in Nice and their farmhouse in west Cork.

His first two marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by Elizabeth, Oonagh and Sibyl, and his grandchildren, Eve and Theo.

John Montague, poet and writer, born 28 February 1929; died 10 December 2016

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