Wake Forest University Press

Irish Poetry

John Montague - Mount Eagle (paperback)

"Beyond and around the human natural is its base, its home: the unhuman universe.  Montague feels this reality as more powerful, more enduring, and perhaps more important than human nature itself.... [Montague's poems] are open-ended. His whole endeavor as a poet is open-ended because iti s a process of exploration." Sean Lucy, Irish Literary Supplement

"His optimism is never forced, always aware of the 'gloomy procession of casualties'; but, like the salmon swimming upstream in the early poems in the book, his aim is to spawn into affirmation.  Montague has always organized his collections with great care, poems echoing and developing each other, and this is no exception.  It reveals a considerable poet at the heigh of his powers continuing to plumb 'the lost world of primordial depths.' " Conor Kelly, In Dublin

Pacific Legend

In their houses beneath the sea
the salmon glide, in human form.

They assume their redgold skin
to mount the swollen stream,

Wild in the spawning season;
a shining sacrifice for men!

So throw back these bones again:
they will flex alive, grow flesh

When the ruddy salmon returns,
a lord to his underwater kingdom.

 

$6.95
1989   75 pages
paperback
ISBN 978-0-916390-33-4