Well Dreams: Essays on John Montague

by Thomas Dillon Redshaw (Editor)

Overview

Redshaw gathers twenty-one original essays on the influential Irish poet and novelist, which provide a critical context for Montague's Collected Poems (1995) and the tales and portraits in Company (2001). Montague played a pivotal role in the international evolution of Irish poetry from the late 1950s in Dublin through the worst years of the Troublesin Northern Ireland. Here, American, English, and European critics and scholars touch upon every aspect of Montague's essays, stories, and poetry. Redshaw offers a survey of the criticism and a descriptive checklist. A stunning tribute to a masterful poet [with] seminal essays by some of the finest critics of contemporary Irish poetry . . . mandatory reading.-Michael Patrick Gillespie, Marquette University, President, The American Conference for Irish Studies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781881871453
Publisher:	Fordham University Press
Publication date:	03/12/2004
Edition description:	1
Pages:	443
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Thomas Dillon Redshaw is Professor of English at the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, where he founded the journal New Hibernia Review for the Center for Irish Studies.

Table of Contents

	Abbreviated Citations	ix
	"The Water There": Montague and His Readers	1
	Forms of Exile: Poems and Satires, 1946-58	29
	"Like Snow Off a Rope": Montague's Publishers and His British Readership in the Sixties	46
	Unsentimental Prophecy: John Montague and The Dolmen Miscellany (1962)	63
	"A Richly Ambiguous Position": Re-viewing Poisoned Lands, A Chosen Light, and Tides	81
	The Landscape of Three Irelands: Hewitt, Murphy, and Montague	95
	"That First, Best Country": The Literary Landscape of Montague's Tyrone	113
	L'Exil et le Royaume-Uni: John Montague's Death of a Chieftain (1964)	127
	"Lines of Leaving / Lines of Returning": John Montague's Double Vision	147
	"Something Mourns": Wordsworth and the Landscape of Mourning in The Rough Field (1972)	167
	Ceol na mBreag: Gaelic Themes in The Rough Field	194
	The Montague Music: "Everything Has a Sound"	211
	"Blood Talk": Politics and Family in A Slow Dance (1975) and The Dead Kingdom (1984)	230
	Illustrations
	Thomas Kinsella, John Montague, and Liam Miller (c. 1961)
	Barrie Cooke, Drawing for All Legendary Obstacles (1966)
	John Derricke, A Discouerie of Woodkerne (1581), Pl. II
	John Derricke, A Discouerie of Woodkerne, Pl. III
	Opening Page of A Severed Head (1972)
	"Sword Land" Page from This Neutral Realm (1984)
	Back and Front Cover of The Cave of Night (1974)
	John Montague at Grattan Hill, Cork (c. 1980)
	Radical Metaphors in A Slow Dance	260
	John Montague's The Dead Kingdom and the Postwar American Elegy	276
	Purgatorialita: Reading Montague Sub Specie Dantis	289
	Weighing In: John Montague and Seamus Heaney	300
	Amor and Absence: John Montague's About Love (1993)	318
	The Dark School of Childhood: Yeats, Joyce, Montague's Time in Armagh (1993)	331
	Unexpected Affirmations: "Border Sick Call" (1995) and "The Three Last Things" (1997)	348
	"A Grafted Tongue": Montague's Collected Poems (1995)	363
	Montague Bound: A Note on Collected Poems	376
	Books by John Montague: A Descriptive Checklist, 1958-2001	393
	Notes on Contributors	434
	Acknowledgments	437
	Index	439

Editorial Reviews

...an exploration into great modern Irish literarture, a truly necessary and valuable work that spans Montague's long career while commenting clearly and thoroughly on a poet of significant stature and one quite worthy of many future studies.

Irish Literary Supplement