Since mid-October our skies and shores have carried the evocative sounds of winter migrant birds, swans, geese, waders and other wildfowl, all here from colder lands to feed and roost amidst our milder climate.
The winter thrushes, redwings and fieldfares have arrived too from Scandinavia to forage on softer ground and plentiful berries. Yet when the year turns, and spring approaches, these species will respond to lengthening days and the breeding urge will draw them back to their natal grounds in the far north.
Watching and listening to the birds in recent weeks I wondered where home is for them. They divide their time between two locations in a cycle of exile and return, which has occurred for millennia. When the winter birds move north again in spring, another mass migration occurs, this time, of summer migrants, chiffchaff, willow warbler, cuckoo and swallow, all arriving from their southern quarters to breed here.
I pondered on all of this while reading through my late father’s treasured copy of John Montague’s Collected Poems, (1995) where in the many sequences, the poet explores themes of travel, exile, loss and national identity. Montague, born in Brooklyn, New York in 1929, lived there for four years, but with times extremely difficult during the Great Depression, he and his two brothers were sent back to Ireland by his parents.
While his brothers went to their maternal grandmother’s in Fintona, John was sent to his ancestral home in Garvaghey, from the Irish, Garbh achaidh, a rough field, to be brought up by his two unmarried aunts, a place, in his own words of, “merging low hills and gravel streams, / Oozy blackness of bog-banks, tough upland grass”.
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Like many of the great 20th century Irish poets, John Montague often wrote powerfully about the natural world, especially the landscape around his childhood home, demonstrating a deep sense of place, as in Like Dolmens Round My Childhood where he writes of the “mountain lane / Where heather bells bloomed, clumps of foxglove”.
In Christmas Morning, also from The Rough Field collection (1972), he describes the image of locals travelling to mass, “Under rimmed hawthorn... Along cattle paths / Crusted with ice.” His eye for landscape detail is evident throughout much of his work and wildlife often features as a reference point and inspiration for his narratives such as a swallow in The Fight, where the poet recounts his knowledge of the swallow’s nest and the “fragility” of the bird’s eggs, “lightly freckled / With colour, in their cradle / Of feathers, twigs, earth.”
In the poem Windharp he describes the wind as “that restless whispering / you never get away from, seeping out of low bushes and grass, heatherbells and fern, wrinkling bog pools, scraping tree branches.”
Memories of his visits to the river and spring well are remembered in The Water Carrier, where again the landscape is vividly described: “A bramble-rough path ran to the river / Where you stepped carefully across slime-topped stones’ and then, “through a rushy meadow” for spring water, inhaling, as you waited “until the bucket brimmed”...”the musty smell of unpicked berries.”
After reading many of Montague’s poems, I reflected again on our migrant birds and concluded ‘home’ must be wherever they are at any given time, an identity stretched across and easily shared by both host countries and their places of birth.
On Thursday, December 5, a new biography of John Montague, A Poet’s Life, by acclaimed author Adrian Frazier, a friend of the poet, is being launched, appropriately, in the Tyrone GAA Centre, Garvaghey, at 7pm, the Rough Field, from where much of his wonderful poetry was framed. Everyone welcome
