If I were … beginning a re-reading of John Montague, or if I were advising others where to begin reading him, I would go, and send those others to the heart of his collection, "Tides."… And to two works there, one of them a quite horrifying prose-poem entitled with a cold irony that is typical of Montague: "The Huntsman's Apology." (pp. 1-2)

The second work is brief, called "A Meeting," and is from the ninth-century Irish…. (p. 2)

The startling thing is that both are poems about varieties of love, or about love at different stages, of development or decay. They come at the heart of a book that holds other fine love-poems and in which the blurb, with perhaps an echo of the poet's voice, says with a great deal of justification that the directness and passion of Montague's love-poems have been admired, and his feeling for people and landscape, and claims that in this collection, "Tides," all these are seen as a part of a larger struggle where life and death are interwoven like the rhythms of the sea. (pp. 2-3)

Montague, lean and sharp and soft and sensible, as Berowne uses the word, sees his lovers absurdly balanced on the springs of a bed, shadows swooping, quarreling like winged bats, bodies turning like fish "in obedience to the pull and tug of your great tides." A wind-swept holiday resort on the shore of the North sea becomes a perfect setting for the monster of unhappiness, "an old horror movie come true," to crawl out of the moving deeps and threaten love…. It is a bitter sort of comedy.

It is scarcely then by accident that he places in the middle of all these love-poems the best rendering, from the Irish of the ninth-century, of the love-dirge, or bitter memory of past loves and bitter consciousness of bodily decay, of the Cailleach Beara, the Hag or Old Woman of Beare: which is the southwestern peninsula between Bantry Bay and Kenmare Bay, the land of the O'Sullivans. The Cailleach, a formidable ancient, overburdened with all knowledge and weariness and sometimes, all wickedness, is a recurring figure in Celtic mythologies and shows her face, on occasions and on various bodies, in Montague's poetry.

A one-eyed hag, she—or the poet who interpreted her, as Montague does eleven centuries later—reckons that her right eye has been taken as a down-payment on her claim to heaven; a ray in the left eye has been spared to her that she may grope her way to heaven's gate. Her life has come to be a retreating sea with no tidal return. Gaunt with poverty she, who once wore fine petticoats, now hunts for rags to cover her body. (p. 3)

In this collection, one of the … most striking poems is certainly: "Life Class." It opens calmly, clinically, a cool detailed survey of the body there to be studied, the hinge of the ankle-bone defining the flat space of a foot, the calf's heavy curve sweeping down against the bony shin, the arm cascading from shoulder-knob to knuckle, shapes as natural, as inanimate almost, as sea-worn caves, as pools, boulders, tree-trunks. This is the artist in the neolithic cavern recording in wonderment the skeleton of the life he sees, an art that may have been as utilitarian as modern engineering. (p. 4)

There is much more in the collection, "Tides," than I have here indicated: more than love and lust, and woman, young and old, and ancient mythologies. There are, for instance, wise words to and about Beckett, and about Joyce, and a moving farewell to places and parents, and a seagull's view of his own town which misses only history and religion: which Montague is not to miss when later he takes a more-than-seagull's view of Garvaghey (Garbh Achaidh), "The Rough Field," where he comes from. The collection, too, is rich, as is his earlier poetry, with the preoccupations of a man who has known, and to the bone, the ways of three countries: Ireland, France and the USA. (p. 5)

[Generally throughout] "Poisoned Lands," and in the following collection, "A Chosen Light," [Montague] has hammered his thoughts, and his places, into unity, and, also, the past and present of his own country. The shape of his mind has been made clear and his style has a sinewy sort of seeming nonchalance on which he is steadily to work and rework giving "slight but memoried life" a deep, universal significance. He casts a careful eye even on an old-style country byre and sees the milking-machine at work, and the old ways changing….

He walks among mythologies on the grassy mounds of the hill of Tara, that was the residence of the High Kings of pre-Christian Ireland, and wonders was it a Gaelic acropolis or a smoky hovel, and sees wolf-hounds "lean as models," follow at the heels of heroes out of the sagas: a sardonic bringing-together of the images of two ages…. The strangest variety of objects and people become symbols before his clear and wondering eye…. [His] is a rich and varied world….

By the end of his second collection, "A Chosen Light," he has gathered together and arranged like ornaments his foreign experiences, he can cast a calm eye even if it is an eye of foreboding, on his own country: and the calmness and foreboding can burst into bawdy laughter…. (p. 9)

Utter assurance comes to Montague with the composition and arrangement of "The Rough Field," his most remarkable book and one of the most interesting statements made in this century about Ireland past and present. (p. 10)

It is a unity, a movement and sequence of poems as strong and steady as the mountain stream descending on the lowlands to define a world, taking with it the past and present of that one small backward place, but a place over-burdened with history: for it is part of the country of the great Hugh O'Neill who warred for nine years against Elizabeth the first of England. Montague glosses his text, indeed, with fragments of ancient history, with a clipping now and then from current news, even with a bigot's letter pushed through a letter-box and ranting against the Romish wafer. (pp. 10-11)

Family history and his own personal agony, and the history of the place over three and a half centuries, onward from the end of the great O'Neill to the calamities of the present, are all twisted together, strands in a strong rope….

Nowhere in the book is the tight razor-edged discipline of his verse and his uncanny knack for gathering the ages together more on display than in the movement that deals with the present problems of Derry City! "A Second Siege."… An extra dimension is introduced from his experiences elsewhere and Irish troubles are seen as part of the world's experiences. He was in Berkeley, California, for the beginning of the campus tumults there, and bombs in the Bogside and napalm in Vietnam are all part of the human condition…. (p. 11)

[He] surveys a world that may, as because of the San Adreas fault, California may, fall apart any of these days. Although he can be agonized and terrified by memory it could still be that he is happiest with those old people who, like dolmens, surrounded his childhood: Jamie MacCrystal who sang to himself a broken song without tune: Maggie Owens who was "a well of gossip defiled."… (p. 12)

Since "The Rough Field" there have been two collections, "A Slow Dance" and "The Great Cloak."… [You] will find that they richly reward reading and re-reading, right through—so to speak, for the pace, arrangement and continuity are insistent, and they amply justify Robin Skelton's strong claim that Montague is: "clearly one of the most skilled and interesting poets alive, and one of the most original and disturbing." The poet … has the confidence and assurance, and for very good reasons, that the young man thirty years ago pretended to have. The pared-down lines are rich in irony, humanity, the sense of transience and mortality in love, in men and women, in nations and civilizations: a keen, exact expression.

That slow dance is a dance of life and death, of calm observation alternating with strange fantasy…. He sees a sawmill on the road to Geneva; sees life emerge, a calf licked clean by a cow, from the cave of an old limekiln in Ireland…. Sees an old French colonel in his final retreat in a Normandy chateau. Writes a lament "so total" that it mourns no one but the great globe itself.

"The Great Cloak" is an intensely personal poem-sequence about the death of love, and abandonment and betrayal, about the birth and growth of a new love…. The only poem I can compare it with, and it is very much a unity and no haphazard collection, is George Meredith's, "Modern Love": yet if it can, at times, be tense with agony and regret, it does not end as Meredith does in a sort of half-resigned despair, but rises to hope and renewal and a new life being born. No mortal who has realized that life is not a straight line can fail to be moved by this poem: happier people should cross themselves and thank whatever gods there be for something like good fortune. (pp. 12-13)