Author Description

After his Ulster epic, The Rough Field, hailed by Hugh MacDiarmid in Agenda as 'a wonderful achievement', this new collection by John Montague shows that his lyric gift, as displayed in Tides, which was a Recommendation of the Poetry Book Society, continues to develop in intense and varied ways.A Slow Dance contains meditations on death, like 'Courtyard in Winter' and 'A Graveyard in Queens', as well as grotesque sequences like The Cave of Night' and 'O Riada's Farewell' which commemorates the poet's composer friend who died in 1971. But these are balanced by the elemental energies displayed in 'Dowager', Hero's Portion', 'Colonel, Retreating'.A dance of death and life is suggested by the developing extremism of John Montague's idiom in this collection, and the title sequence in particular mimes a deep psychic experience of intimacy with the earth, caused, perhaps by the poet's return to his native Ireland after a decade in exile. Glimpses of anarchy, terror, and sometimes sweetness suggest the increasingly harsh vision of A Slow Dance which has developed as a collection parallel to a series of love poems, The Great Cloak, which' will be published later.A Slow Dance is a Christmas 1975 Recommendation of the Poetry Book Society.John Montague, born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1929, has published many collections of verse as well as a collection of short stories. He has lived in Ireland. America and France and has recently returned to a permanent Irish home in Cork where he lectures at University College. He edited The Faber Book of Irish Verse, 1974.The drawing on the cover is by Jack Coughlin)