Poet
John Montague
John Montague
(United States of America, 1929)
© The Gallery Press
Biography
John Montague was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1929. At the age of four he was sent to live with his father\'s sisters at Garvaghey, Co. Tyrone, Northern Ireland. Since the early 1970s Cork has been his home, divided more lately with a home in Nice, France. Montague is well travelled. He was educated at St. Patrick\'s College, Armagh, University College Dublin and Yale. He was Paris correspondent for the Irish Times where he met his first wife, Madeleine, a French aristocrat.
Montague is one of the major Irish poets of the 20th Century. The American critic Harold Bloom includes Montague in his selection for The Canon. Montague\'s American instincts provide, along with those of Thomas Kinsella, an important counterweight to the more British influences of other major poets from Northern Ireland such as Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley and Derek Mahon.
Perhaps influenced by the likes of Williams\'s Paterson, Montague\'s oeuvre contains many extended sequences, a poetic stratagem devised also by his contemporary Richard Murphy and which subsequently was taken up by many an Irish poet from Seamus Heaney to Brendan Kennelly to Paul Durcan. Montague\'s example has encouraged a younger generation of Munster poets to be more cosmopolitan in their influences, drawing inspiration from European as well as American and British influences. he is one of the Anglophone world\'s most prolific and respected translators of contemporary French poetry. Some of his translations of Claude Esteban are available on the French pages of this website.
© Patrick Cotter
Select Bibliography Poetry
Collected Poems, Gallery, Oldcastle, 1995
A Drunken Sailor, Gallery, Oldcastle, 2004
Fiction
Death of A Chieftain, McGibbon & Kee, London, 1964
The Lost Notebook, Mercier Press, Cork, 1987
A Love Present, Wolfhound Press, Dublin, 1999
Memoir
Born in Brooklyn, White Pine Press, New York, 1991
Company, Duckworth, London, 2001
As Editor
Faber Book Of Irish Verse, Faber, London, 1974
Bitter Harvest: An Anthology of Contemporary Irish Verse, Scribners, New York 1989
Translations
November, A Choice of Translations from Andre Frenaud (with Evelyn Robson), Dolmen Dublin, 1972
A Smile Between The Stones, translations from Sur La Dernière Lande by Claude Esteban, Agenda Editions, London, 2004
Links
http://www.gallerypress.com/Authors/Jmontague/jmont.html
(Montague\'s page with poetry publisher)
http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/montague.html
(New York Writers\' Institute Profile)
http://www.allihies.ie/jmontaguep1.html
(more poems online)
http://www.munsterlit.ie/Conwriters/john_montague.html
(Munster Literature Centre Profile)
Poems
Poems of John Montague
Sponsors
Partners
LantarenVenster – Verhalenhuis Belvédère