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 will offer the pleasure in their sequences of minute and mature observations sounded in a music of the spoken voice.
American-born Irish poet, writer of short fiction, essayist, and professor. Graduate of University College Dublin and the University of Iowa.
Awarded honourary doctorates by the State University of New York at Buffalo, the University of Ulster, and University College Dublin. Recipient of the American Ireland Fund Literary Award, the Irish-American Cultural Institute’s Award for Literature, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and Australia's Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize.
He was appointed the first occupant of the Ireland Chair of Poetry. A native of Brooklyn, New York, he became Distinguished Writer-in-Residence for the New York State Writers' Institute and Professor of Poetry and Writer-in-Residence at State University of New York at Albany. He also taught at University College Cork, Queen’s University in Belfast, Trinity College Dublin, and his alma mater University College Dublin.
In addition to receiving honourary doctorates in the United States and Ireland, France invested him a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur.