DESCRIPTION : At seventy-five, John Montague, the doyen of Ulster poetry, is as vigorous and creative as ever. Drunken Sailor opens at the mouth of Cork Harbour, then journeys across the county to West Cork before embracing matters of his Northern past. Mortality and the power of myth are among his subjects, and there is an underlying dialogue with Yeats, from the ruined towers at Roche's Point, to the glimpse of Ben Bulben in the ambitious longer poem, The Plain of Blood, with which the book culminates. But Montague's vision is both more pagan and more Catholic. In his second volume of lyrics since Collected Poems (1995), John Montague combines the energy and ardour of a young poet with the wisdom and rue of a sage.

EXTRAIT

Mary Kate's Kitchen The gate scringes upon its hollowed stone. I feel I have stumbled back into my own : old men brooding before a metal hearth, women bustling between pantry and oilcloth, a moon-faced wall clock and display of delph, the girlish gravitas of the Virgin on her shelf. A long way round to curve near home again, kindling embers of a long-smoored self.