"One can only set up against [Montague] the great love poems: Chaucer's superb lyric, the most formidable of Shakespeare's Sonnets and a scattering from other Elizabethans and Cavaliers, together with a few poems each from Burns, Byron, Shelley, Landor, Browning, Meredith and Yeats.… From this time on, whatever else he may write, John Montague's voice will always be raised in the ranks of the great poets of our literature." Robin Skelton, Malahat Review

The Great Cloak
for Evelyn

Smooth and long to swathe
a handsome woman's body,
a shape tall as a bell,
obedient to a fingernail.

Or to encompass her lover
as well, snug as flea deep
in featherbed, while their bodies
converse, on a green slope.

Or when the baby is born
to wrap the morsel tenderly
while beasts browse around them
naturally as in Bethlehem.

$6.95 paperback (Second printing)
ISBN 0-916390-07-1
ISBN13 978-0-916390-07-5

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