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Product Description
The Figure in the Cave selects the prose of one of Ireland’s foremost contemporary poets – part autobiography, part criticism, part self-commentary – a gathering, from the mid-century to the present day, that marks a lifetime’s critical engagement with literature in both Europe and America. In the title essay Montague looks over his career as a writer; in others he describes a coming-of-age in Ulster, explores his own poetics, and appraises Goldsmith, Carleton, George Moore, Joyce and Beckett, MacNeice, Clarke, Kavanagh, Hewitt and MacDiarmid. Pieces on American literature include a vignette of Saul Bellow, a review of Lowell and an intimate sketch of Berryman. To conclude, the author examines the impact of international modern poetry on Irish writing. Humorous, forceful, impressionistic, enriched with personal and political observation, this dialogue between early and later selves traces the development of the boy from Garvaghey to the figure in the cave, and reveals the workings of a fine poet’s mind.
John Montague was born in Brooklyn, New York on February 28, 1929. He was educated at University College Dublin and Yale University. He was a poet, writer, and translator. His works included Forms of Exile, Poisoned Lands, The Death of a Chieftain, A Chosen Light, Tides, A Slow Dance, The Great Cloak, The Rough Field, The Dead Kingdom, Mount Eagle, Border Sick Call, The Figure in the Cave, Smashing the Piano, Company, Drunken Sailor, Speech Lessons, and Second Childhood. He also edited The Faber Book of Irish Verse, which featured many of his translations. He helped found Claddagh Records, which publishes traditional artists and leading literary figures in Ireland. He died on December 10, 2016.
The spine on the cover is sunned, sticker residue mark on back cover.
