Mount Eagle

A new collection by the outstanding Irish poet John Montague. Though these poems have all the strengths of his previous work — the acute eye for physical detail, the melancholy but unsentimental lament over politics and history, the personal revelations of love — there is a new note in this volume: a leap toward the visionary fish-eye and avian perspective, a leap toward life’s borderlands.

John Montague, of Irish descent, was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1929. He has published a substantial body of poetry as well as two collections of short stories, an autobiographical novella and a book of memoirs. Since the early 1970s Cork has been his home, and has become one of the major Irish poets of the 20th Century, continuing to write and publish while into his seventies. The American critic Harold Bloom has Montague in his selection for what he considers The Canon. Montague’s American instincts provide, along with 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.