John Montague : Time in Armagh (Irish Poetry)

by John Montague

ISBN: 9781852351120

Published: 1993

Time in Armagh was originally published in 1993 but has not been available in the United States until now. John Montague was born in Brooklyn in 1929 but was raised in Ireland on the family farm in County Tyrone. This sequence of lyrics explores Montague's brutal and painful schooldays at Saint Patrick's College in Armagh. Ireland's ecclesiastical capital, during World War II -- "It is tempting to think that this was the last period of a typical Catholic boarding-school education (all the way back to medieval times), and that the great events happening in the outside world would hasten change in our little one." In these poems ancient and personal histories are intertwined inside a collage of contemporary events. But, as always, Montague celebrates how, even in an atmosphere of organized repression, the instinct for love can prevail.