Telling his story in poetry

Poet John Montague arrives back indoors from the surprise blackness of the early evening, his face reddened by the cold air. Trinity College has settled for the night. The last rugby players have completed their match post-mortems and have moved off. News that the Ulster Unionist Council has signalled acceptance of the devolution and decommissioning package seems to have pleased him but Montague is too battle hardened at this stage to express public excitement with more than a wry shrug.

Now 70, he became the first Ireland Professor of Poetry last year - and has to date been busy honouring his three-year rotation at Queen's, Trinity and, next year, UCD, delivering lectures and "responding to invitations". Amused at the thought of it, he says: "I delivered a lecture on Beckett here, one of their own, and as I knew him in Paris had some funny stories which made them laugh." Montague has also been writing: his latest collection Smashing the Piano was published last week and, continuing his interest in translating modern French poets, his translation of Eugene Guillevic's (19071977) long Carnac sequence has also recently appeared.

To say John Montague, who has never made a secret of either his ego or his insecurities, is looking decidedly pleased with himself, is something of an understatement. There is a distinct element of good naturedly defiant self-satisfaction about him - he has suffered and survived.

Most questions put to Montague may be answered by his work; he has looked at himself and Ireland, its legacy and its problems, through poetry. When he writes in "Robert, Old Stager", a poem in the new book: "In an ageing face still smoulders/ the eager obstinacy of the young" he may as well be referring to himself. Montague frequently refers to "my generation, the generation of Thomas Kinsella and Richard Murphy, the generation which came before Heaney, Longley and Mahon", but his awareness of his elder statesman status has not diminished his hunger, despite the fact this new book has a gentler, warmer tone and the memories evoked in it are dominated by happy family pictures. The work is less angry, less rhetorical, but as directed as ever, particularly in the "Civil Wars" sequence.

Although long settled in Cork, at present he and his partner Elizabeth Wassell reside in Trinity, in a gracious if rather small room dominated by a bed and a work table. The prospect of revisiting his life does not fill Montague with joy; with a small gesture of resigned exasperation he asks: "Do I really have to go over all that again?" Having spoken for a few minutes on the question of life being directed by chance and coincidence, by fate or the random, he feels badly about Wassell, who has absented herself and is waiting in the small kitchen; he calls her back into the room and she sits on the bed. A discreet support system.

His story is well chronicled in his work. Indeed, the respective stories of Ireland and Montague walk hand-in-hand through it, but he can be a good storyteller when he chooses and his experiences have been varied enough to provide him with a handful of cultural settings. Though he grew up on a farm in Co Tyrone, and served his time as a border in St Patrick's College in Armagh, the US-born Montague, who was sent to Ireland at the age of four, has also lived in France and the US.

While he repeatedly speaks of himself as "a poor Ulster Catholic boy", and his work resounds with a sense of place and legacy - "Ancient Ireland, indeed! I was reared by her beside,/ The rune and the chant, evil eye and averted head," (from "Like Dolmens Round My Childhood, The Old People") - he seems to have come from everywhere and nowhere in particular. This is compounded by the fact that as a youth he took his brother's advice and, instead of going to Queen's University in Belfast, he travelled south in 1946 "where there were more people" and attended UCD.

His early life was hard. "It was painful and I find it painful to speak about it," he says, and Wassell refers to his having lost his family. On arriving in Ireland with his two elder brothers, Montague was separated from them. The older boys stayed with their maternal grandmother while, at his father's insistence, the youngest Montague, "the runt/ left to be fostered" was sent to the paternal home in Garvaghey, Co Tyrone. The place would later provide him with the name of his finest work, The Rough Field.

But first it was home, where he was raised by his aunts on what remained of the family farm (they also ran the local post office). His mother returned to her family home from the US three years later, and visited Garvaghey about once a year. By that time her youngest child had already established himself as a bright lad in Garvaghey Primary School and was something of a star at reading aloud.

This would be challenged, however, when he moved class, "where I was taunted by a mistress/ who hunted me publicly down/ to near speechlessness./ `So this is our brightest infant?/ Where did he get that outlandish accent?/ What do you expect, with no parents,/ sent back from some American slum:/none of you are to speak like him!'/ Stammer, impediment, stutter:/ she had found my lode of shame/ . . . And not for two stumbling decades/ would I manage to speak straight again." (From "A Flowering Absence").

Even now the stammer can impose itself upon his speech. He believes it has affected his career, specifically his ability to read his work. "That's why I never read the love poems in public, nothing intimate." He smiles and says: "There are those who suspect I exploit my stammer," adding that it has been viewed as a bid for sympathy. With his small, shrewd eyes, hard mouth, quick mind and accent that is more Cork than anything else, he is a robust individual and seems a veritable lumberjack in comparison with the tiny Wassell, a genteel, concerned New Yorker with old world good manners and the air of having stepped from an Edith Wharton novel.

They met at one of his readings in New York about 10 years ago - "she was serving the drink" - and have been together ever since. He has described her as his "eagle-eyed companion" and she knows his work very well. Her second novel, Sleight of Hand, has just been published and their shared literary interest, which suits them both, has been crucial for him.

"We work over there at the table," she says. It is an ideal arrangement for writers. Montague points to the amount of work he has produced since they met and adds: "I always dreamed of working with a partner."

Not for a moment does he allow one to forget he is a major poet; but there is a likeable bravado about the way he announces: "I have always loved intelligent women" and refers to his private life, his two previous marriages, his current happiness, and his daughters Oonagh and Sibyl.

"Oonagh is an actress," he says and Wassell urges "show her the picture". The photograph is presented. Oonagh is dramatically beautiful and her poet father, a man who appears to need women more than most, beams with pride.

The question of his Irishness, his Ulsterness, persists, though. How is it - despite his inherited nationalism, intense exploration of the North's history and his own experiences there, as well as his engagement with the landscape and his understanding of the implications of a severance from one's heritage, as expressed in "A Lost Tradition" - that he never quite strikes one as a wholly Ulster poet? "I have three countries; two Irelands, North and South. Then there's America, where I was born and France, where you can be an intellectual."

There is no denying that Montague, born in Brooklyn in 1929, the year of the Wall Street Crash, was drawn to the US. But as he says: "I was always surrounded by Ulster Catholics. I was born in New York, but into an Irish ghetto." The birth was traumatic for his mother "who was ill for a long time after it". His mother's life was marked by emotional and physical hardship. When she first arrived in the US with her two eldest sons to be reunited with her husband, she discovered his landlord didn't even know he was married.

In ways, Montague remains a small boy cheated of his due. "Lost Worlds", from the new collection illustrates this sense of being denied. "Banished from Brooklyn playgrounds, by chance/ I had fallen into my fathers' [sic] lost inheritance;/ a child's dream of Eden, animals galore:/ Tim nuzzling for sugar at the stable door;/ but I would have bartered the ark of the farmhouse/ for one celluloid squeak from Minnie Mouse."

At St Patrick's in Armagh, Montague emerged as a natural exam candidate in a school determined to show that Catholic boys were as clever as their Protestant counterparts. This pressure didn't bother Montague, but then the emphasis shifted to the pursuit of football glory, not his forte. A scholarship brought him to Dublin. "Post-war Dublin was grim. It was a sour little place." But surely it was one full of poets? Montague laughs and points out that the life experiences of Austin Clarke and Paddy Kavangh "were not that inspiring. It suggested that the life of a poet was a miserable one. It seemed a strange occupation."

Poetry was not an immediate choice. Montague, who has written two volumes of short stories including "Death of a Chieftain", was also drawn to prose and his poetry is, even at its most lyric, usually narrative driven. The Rough Field, The Great Cloak and The Dead Kingdom, which he describes as "orchestrations", are in effect verse novels or, at least, strongly autobiographically-based narratives. Novels, he says, prove difficult for him: "I have a problem with my characters. I either don't like them and want to kill them off, or I make them become friends and . . .", a gesture signifying the project is then rendered hopeless completes the sentence.

Irish poets in Montague's youth were oppressed by one figure. "There was only Yeats and no one else except Kavanagh and Clarke." Once Yeats had finally been dealt with, Montague's generation was "left to discover ourselves". In late 1949, he had begun an MA in Anglo-Irish Literature at UCD and had succeeded Kavanagh as film critic on the Catholic weekly, the Standard. He had also decided it was time for him to travel. He was in need of flight, of "somewhere to flee to", so he headed for France.

In 1953 he attended Yale graduate school where the New Criticism was asserting itself. There he met Robert Lowell and W.H. Auden, while Robert Penn Warren was one of his teachers. But it was not a happy time. Montague says he didn't understand the social nuances. On the recommendation of John Crow Ransome he went to the Iowa Writers' Workshop and also taught part-time at the university. "I'm glad I spent a year there, I experienced the Midwest." Also studying there was a young French woman who would become Montague's first wife in 1956. That same year, he went to Berkeley and was present at the first reading of Alan Ginsberg's Howl. California was a good experience, but on being offered a chance to stay, Montague declined, saying: "I am glad to have seen the Garden of Eden, I'm glad to have played." It was time to go.

On returning to Ireland in late 1956, he worked for Bord Failte for three years. Forms of Exile, his first collection, was published in 1958. The Montagues moved to Paris in 1961, the year he began working on The Rough Field. Another life began, one in which sightings of Beckett, Giacometti and Sartre were a daily happening. There he also met Guillevic and they became friends. The artistic rapport was obvious; Montague was "inspired by the hidden congruence between my own vision and that of Guillevic, between somebody brought up beside the megaliths of Ireland, and another beside the stone alignments of Carnac". In 1967 he returned to Ireland and began teaching at UCD. Within five years he had settled in Cork, drawn there initially by Sean O Riada, who died in 1971. Montague began a long involvement with UCC, where he taught for 16 years, and during which he married for the second time. He says: "I was the model family man."

Some of his finest poems are love lyrics, particularly those dealing with the collapse of emotion and the end of romance. "All Legendary Obstacles", one of his best, is also among the happier. "All day I waited, shifting/ Nervously from station to bar/ . . . At midnight you came, pale/ Above the negro porter's lamp./ I was too blind with rain/ And doubt to speak, but/ Reached from the platform/ Until our chilled hands met."

Timing has often gone against him. He says he began writing about the North at a time when no one else was interested. "I diagnosed the problem." He spent 10 years on The Rough Field which was published in 1972. "And of course I was divorced long before it became acceptable in Ireland."

But the emergence of Seamus Heaney, 10 years his junior, in 1966 with the debut Death of a Naturalist, and whose critical and popular success during the past 20 years has dominated and redefined Irish poetry, has had an obvious impact on all Irish poets, not least Montague. By the cruellest of ironies, Montague's substantial Collected Poems was published on October 9th, 1995, the same day as Heaney won the Nobel Prize for Literature. "Yes," he says neutrally, "that was harsh."

As an Ulster man, an Ulster poet, how does he see the conflict in the North now? "I have had my say in "Civil Wars", he says. The eight-poem sequence, while true to the new collection's gentle tone, remains direct and considers the "song of silence" of Bobby Sands as well as the Omagh bombing: "Who can endorse such violent men?/ As history creaks on its bloody hinge/ and the unspeakable is done again."

Smashing the Piano by John Montague (The Gallery Press, £7. 95). His translation of Guillevic's Carnac sequence is published by Bloodaxe Books, £8.95 in the UK.