Speech Lessons | John Montague
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For more than half a century John Montague has brought a lively diversity of voice and experience to Irish poetry. He is, as John Carey wrote in The Sunday Times, virtually Ireland s poet laureate. . . . His best poems are all autobiographical, and mostly about his aunts farm in County Tyrone . . . Splinter-sharp, they go straight to the heart, and catch in the memory like burrs. Speech Lessons, his latest collection, reprises the great themes of his work his own, his family s and his province s histories. From signs of silent affection on that Ulster farm, the stations of a journey towards a fluent voice, re-imaginings of a bicycle trip along the Marne in the late 1940s and reflections on a President s resignation, he continues his acts of excavation and recreation. In My Grandfather s Mansion , a compendium of memories and another of the author s extended works with a hint of the epic note, is the hub of an uncommonly enterprising and exuberant book.
Speech Lessons | 
