Wake Forest University Press

2002   52 pages
paperback

Drawing its name from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Dharmakaya signals the span of the collection's philosophical concerns: a dialogue between western poetics and Buddhism. The poems evoke the fragile relationship between spirit and body, memory and the material.

Winner of the 2002 Denis Devlin Award from the Irish Arts Council for the best English language book of poetry in the preceding three years.

"Meehan's Dharmakaya shows an Irish poet extending her tradition with courage and wit. … [Her] voice is unmistakable now, and thrilling." Thomas D'Evelyn, Providence Journal

2002   52 pages
clothbound

Drawing its name from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Dharmakaya signals the span of the collection's philosophical concerns: a dialogue between western poetics and Buddhism. The poems evoke the fragile relationship between spirit and body, memory and the material.

Winner of the 2002 Denis Devlin Award from the Irish Arts Council for the best English language book of poetry in the preceding three years.

"If poetry can sing, Meehan has perfect pitch." Midwest Book Review

2005   96 pages
paperback

"John Montague's The Rough Field is a kind of 'state of the nation' poem, built up of visions and glimpses of locality, legend, and history, and as such it is astonishingly successful; moving, too, and as soundly crafted as the rosewood fiddle which seems to play with mourning sweetness in the margins." John Bayley, The New York Review

2005   80 pages
clothbound
Limited, signed, & numbered
First edition with vellum wrapper

"Less strict than British verse, more formal than American, Montague poems take a great variety of forms — imagistic description, dramatic monologues, elegies, litanies, quest romance all appear in the Drunken Sailor.... There are many measured and measuring allusions to the late great Yeats in Drunken Sailor, but this best thing ["Last Court"] is simply great late Montague." Adrian Frazier, Irish Times

2005   80 pages
paperback

"Less strict than British verse, more formal than American, Montague poems take a great variety of forms — imagistic description, dramatic monologues, elegies, litanies, quest romance all appear in the Drunken Sailor.... There are many measured and measuring allusions to the late great Yeats in Drunken Sailor, but this best thing ["Last Court"] is simply great late Montague." Adrian Frazier, Irish Times

2001   88 pages
clothbound

“Montague’s lyrical descriptive powers have never been stronger, and line after line stays in the reader’s head.”  Bernard O'Donoghue, Irish Times

2001   88 pages
paperback

“John Montague has spent a lifetime confronting his own vulnerability, and in doing so, has broadened and strengthened modern Irish poetry. ... As always, Montague sees clearly what has been lost, but also what has been retained and refined over a lifetime. What’s remarkable is the new energy which informs and transforms these well-crafted excursions into lost time. As such, this book is more a rejuvenation than a sequel, a revitalizing of a painful past into a permanent and healing present. Smashing the Piano is Montague at the top of his game.” Kevin Murphy, Irish Literary Supplement

1995   376 pages
clothbound

“Irish life is complex in its interrelations and, of all living poets, Montague succeeds best in capturing this complexity at its deepest level. …perhaps the greatest volume of collected poems to emerge from an Irish poet since Yeats.” Eamonn Wall, Shenandoah

1995   376 pages
paperback

“John Montague has been so long an established fact of the poetry of the English-speaking world that there is a tendency to take his really quite remarkable achievement for granted. He is a poet of enormous lyrical gifts, but he has as well an acute and dramatic sense of history -- reland's and the world's -- and a gentle moral insistence, all of which makes his Collected Poems an absolutely essential volume.” C.K. Williams

1989   96 pages
paperback
Rare & collectible

"Montague's Rough Field is a remarkable primer for those who would truly understand the division of Ireland today." James Coleman, The Compass

"John Montague's The Rough Field is a kind of 'state of the nation' poem, built up of visions and glimpses of locality, legend, and history, and as such it is astonishingly successful; moving, too, and as soundly crafted as the rosewood fiddle which seems to play with mourning sweetness in the margins." - John Bayley, The New York Review