John Montague (poet)
| John Montague | |
|---|---|
| Born |
28 February 1929 Brooklyn, New York, United States |
| Died |
10 December 2016 (aged 87) Nice, France |
| Occupation | Poet, professor |
| Literary movement | Modernism |
John Montague (28 February 1929 − 10 December 2016) was an Irish poet. Survived by his wife Elizabeth Wassell, daughters Oonagh and Sibyl and grandchildren Eve and Theo. He was born in New York and brought up in Tyrone. He published a number of volumes of poetry, two collections of short stories and two volumes of memoir. He was one of the best known Irish contemporary poets. In 1998 he became the first occupant of the Ireland Chair of Poetry (essentially Ireland's poet laureate). In 2010, he was made a Chevalier de la Legion d’honneur, France’s highest civil award.
John Montague was born in Brooklyn, New York, on 28 February 1929. His father, James Montague, an Ulster Catholic, from County Tyrone, had gone to America in 1925 to join his brother John. Both were sons of John Montague, who had been a justice of the peace, combining his legal duties with being a schoolmaster, farmer, postmaster and director of several firms. John continued as postmaster but James became involved in the turbulent Irish Republican scene in the years after 1916, particularly complicated in areas like Fermanagh and Tyrone, on the borders of the newly divided island. Molly (Carney) Montague joined her husband James in America in 1928, with their two elder sons. John was born on Bushwick Avenue at St. Catherine's Hospital, and spent his earliest years playing with his brothers in the streets of Brooklyn, putting nickels on the trolley lines, playing on a tenement roof, seeing early Mickey Mouse movies.
Although Uncle John ran a speakeasy, where he employed his brother, James Montague did not find life in New York easy during the Depression years. So the three boys were shipped back to Ireland in 1933, the two eldest to their maternal grandmother's house in Fintona, Co. Tyrone, where they had been born, but John was sent to his father's ancestral home at Garvaghey, then maintained by two spinster aunts, Brigid and Freda, who welcomed the boy of four.
From New York to a farm on the edge of the Clogher Valley in County Tyrone was a significant step backwards in time. John did all the usual farming chores. He became a normal Ulster farm child, though haunted by the disparity between what the house in Garvaghey had been, in the days of his grandfather and namesake, and the reduced present. Montague reminisced about the gardens of his Ulster home in his poem Paths.
...
Wikipedia