Mount Eagle
$6.95
Montague’s American readers who expect Mount Eagle to return to the political themes of The Dead Kingdom and his masterwork The Rough Field or to the poignant erotic poetry of Tides and The Great Cloak will find a handful of poems haunting these topics. However, most of this volume departs into new terrain, such as American Indian legends, fish-eye and avian perspectives, and the activities of children and others in life’s borderland. Certain poems here, such as “The Hill of Silence,” will earn their permanence in our literature where, in the words of Robin Skelton, “John Montague’s voice will always be raised in the ranks of our great poets.” Other poems in Mount Eagle will offer the pleasure in their sequences of minute and mature observations sounded in a music of the spoken voice.
Praise for Mount Eagle
“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 it is 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 height of his powers continuing to plumb ‘the lost world of primordial depths.’”
— Conor Kelly, In Dublin
Description
Montague’s American readers who expect Mount Eagle to return to the political themes of The Dead Kingdom and his masterwork The Rough Field or to the poignant erotic poetry of Tides and The Great Cloak will find a handful of poems haunting these topics. However, most of this volume departs into new terrain, such as American Indian legends, fish-eye and avian perspectives, and the activities of children and others in life’s borderland. Certain poems here, such as “The Hill of Silence,” will earn their permanence in our literature where, in the words of Robin Skelton, “John Montague’s voice will always be raised in the ranks of our great poets.” Other poems in Mount Eagle will offer the pleasure in their sequences of minute and mature observations sounded in a music of the spoken voice.
Praise for Mount Eagle
“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 it is 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 height of his powers continuing to plumb ‘the lost world of primordial depths.’”
— Conor Kelly, In Dublin
Additional information
| Publication date: | 1989 |
|---|---|
| Pages: | 75 |
| Binding: | paperback |
