Sir, - The overview is ever prone to oversight, and Michael Coffey (June 30th) does well to correct Frank McCourt's bold assertion (June 20th) that the Irish experience of the cauldron of New York "never bred a bard", but, incourteously removing the mote from his neighbour's eye, he somehow manages to ignore the sizeable plank in his own.
We have such a bard, whose vivid, heart-hammering poems of the immigrant or "narrowback" confrontation with the new world have been collected in a volume whose title, "Born in Brooklyn", gives the lie to McCourt, and he is our first Laureate Professor of Poetry, John Montague.
His omission is all the more glaring in that Montague, through his criticism and poetry, opened up Irish verse which was sinking into a slough (I had nearly said bog) of conservatism, to the protean influences of the new poetry coming out of the States. Friend of Roethke, who came to Inishbofin seeking maybe "the dark permanence of ancient forms"; friend of Berryman, who came to Dublin to write the penultimate and death-defying Irish book of his Dream Songs; he has been the conduit for a whole generation of poets and readers of precisely the American experience McCourt describes.
But at least McCourt is right in his implication that there is always a need for "the voice of the poet". I write this to you now not out of an urge pedantically to amend Coffey's list of poets who have "addressed the experience of being Irish in America", but because John Montague's poems are important to me, speaking as they do to my own experience of deracination and cultural dissonance - I too came to Ireland from the States as a child - and in their passion and achieved insight are an indispensible model to those of us in the rising generation who are trying to write of that experience. - Yours, etc.,John O'Leary,
Beara,
Co Cork.