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John Montague was a boisterous enigma. He had a bagful of golf tricks, on and off the course. He could knock a bird off a wire from 170 yards, and when the big man arrived in Hollywood in the early 1930s, he quickly became a celebrity among celebrities. He played golf with everyone from Howard Hughes to Babe Ruth and his close friend Bing Crosby, whom he famously beat with only a rake, a shovel, and a bat. Yet strangely Montague never entered a professional tournament, and he never allowed his image to be captured on film. When a photographer snapped his picture with a telephoto lens, police in upstate New York recognized him as a fugitive wanted for armed robbery. As Montague was indicted, hordes of national media descended and turned a star-studded legal carnival into the most talked about trial of its day.--From publisher description.

This present article is an account of the sense of place in the poetry of Seamus Heaney and John Montague. Each poet is approached through poems representative of a rural imaginary of boglands, potato drills, and bodies of water. The line of argument is sensitive to the numinous meanings Heaney and Montague imbue their natural worlds with, and the analysis focuses upon their rootedness and reliance on place for poetic inspiration. In Heaney's account, this is demonstrated with a nuanced and deliberative approach to poems that excavate the historical layerings of the bog while also tying this back to agricultural labor. This yields the source of Heaney's craft of writing, just as Montague constructs a sort of ars poetica through images of water. This is a brief and comprehensive analysis of both poets and the importance of regionalism in late twentieth-century Irish or Northern Irish poetry.

In Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Pastoral Tradition, Donna L. Potts closely examines the pastoral genre in the work of six Irish poets writing today. Through the exploration of the poets and their works, she reveals the wide range of purposes that pastoral has served in both Northern Ireland and the Republic: a postcolonial critique of British imperialism; a response to modernity, industrialization, and globalization; a way of uncovering political and social repercussions of gendered representations of Ireland; and, more recently, a means for conveying environmentalism's more complex understanding of the value of nature. Potts traces the pastoral back to its origins in the work of Theocritus of Syracuse in the third century and plots its evolution due to cultural changes. While all pastoral poems share certain generic traits, Potts makes clear that pastorals are shaped by social and historical contexts, and Irish pastorals in particular were influenced by Ireland's unique relationship with the land, language, and industrialization due to England's colonization. For her discussion, Potts has chosen six poets who have written significant collections of pastoral poetry and whose work is in dialogue with both the pastoral tradition and other contemporary pastoral poets. Three poets are men—John Montague, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley—while three are women—Eavan Boland, Medbh McGuckian, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. Five are English-language authors, while the sixth—Ní Dhomhnaill—writes in Irish. Additionally, some of the poets hail from the Republic, while others originate from Northern Ireland. Potts contends that while both Irish Republic and Northern Irish poets respond to a shared history of British colonization in their pastorals, the 1921 partition of the country caused the pastoral tradition to evolve differently on either side of the border, primarily because of the North's more rapid industrialization; its more heavily Protestant population, whose response to environmentalism was somewhat different than that of the Republic's predominantly Catholic population; as well the greater impact of the world wars and the Irish Troubles. In an important distinction from other studies of Irish poetry, Potts moves beyond the influence of history and politics on contemporary Irish pastoral poetry to consider the relatively recent influence of ecology. Contemporary Irish poets often rely on the motif of the pastoral retreat to highlight various environmental threats to those retreats—whether they be high-rises, motorways, global warming, or acid rain. Potts concludes by speculating on the future of pastoral in contemporary Irish poetry through her examination of more recent poets—including Moya Cannon and Paula Meehan—as well as other genres such as film, drama, and fiction.

For Irish writers, Spenser has become a nettle to be grasped, a stinging symbol of a fractured Irish history and a fractured literary tradition. But there is opportunity in the grasping. Thus Spenser’s life, as much as his poetry, exerts a significant influence on Irish writers, and not just poets. In Frank McGuinness’s play Mutabilitie (1997), John Montague’s The Rough Field (1972), or in poems by Seamus Heaney, Ciaran Carson, and Brendan Kennelly, certain conspicuously Spenserian topoi dominate: the shocking description of the Munster famine from the View; his poetic professions of loyalty to Elizabeth, the “faerie queene”; the burning of Kilcolman castle. But less conspicuous Spenserian motifs and concerns resurface in unexpected ways in modern Irish writing, often at moments of literary or political crisis, enacting different kinds of concerns. Spenser’s rivers—“Mulla,” “Molanna” and even the “Sweet Thames” of “Prothalamion”—course through Irish writing, sometimes only half-consciously. The apocryphal story of a child of Spenser’s lost while Kilcolman castle burned is another powerful figure to which Irish writers have been drawn, not only as a figure of loss but also of an entente that may already have happened, a hidden history of Anglo-Irish relations that remains to be told. This essay maps Spenser’s influence on modern Irish poetry, novels, and drama through these figures. It uncovers the literary and political work that direct engagements with Spenser seek to perform, and re-orients Spenser’s place in Irish literary tradition as, paradoxically, a touchstone, even perhaps the “created conscience” of Irish literature.

(1929– ), Irish poet. His volumes of poetry include Forms of Exile (1958), Poisoned Lands (

  John Montague, the great Ulster poet and first Ireland professor of poetry, who has just died in his beloved France, will be mourned by everyone who understands Irish poetry. Popular poems Montague's first collection of poems, Forms of Exile , was published by Dolmen Press in 1958. This was followed by the masterful Poisoned Lands in 1961 and then by one of his greatest books, A Chosen Light , in 1967. This book contains two of his most popular poems: The Trout and All Legendary Obstacles . Montague won many awards, from the Martin Toonder Award in 1976 to the Bord Gis Energy Bob Hughes Lifetime Achievement Award presented just three weeks ago. He was a founding director of Claddagh Records; founding member of Aosdna; founding president and lifelong supporter of the Triskel Arts Centre, Cork; president of Poetry Ireland; and a Chevalier de la Lgion d'Honneur.

  This year's events include a public conversation between Paul Durcan and Tipperary hurling manager Eamon O'Shea in the Source Arts Centre in Thurles, and readings from the Poems that Make Grown Men Cry anthology in Books Upstairs on D'Olier Street, Dublin, at 1pm. Poetry Ireland's writers in schools scheme is bringing three poets to schools on three islands around the coast - Cape Clear Island primary school; St Mary's primary school on Rathlin Island; and Coliste Naomh Eoin on Inis Mein.

  In 1998 he was named the first Ireland professor of poetry, a three-year appointment to Queen's University Belfast, Trinity College Dublin and University College Dublin, created in the spirit of the Belfast Agreement. In 2010, he was made a Chevalier de la Lgion d'Honneur, France's highest civil award.