Speech Lessons

'The long hangar of the turf shed faces the Broad Road where cars whine. There our winter warmth is stored . . .' 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.