John Montague is one of the few indispensable voices coming out of Ireland today. It is probably inevitable that this Irishman of Ulster Catholic stock who has spent so much of his time in Paris should have at last settled in Cork, in a southern Irish city roughly midway between those two cultural antipodes. A poet of great sensitivity and intelligence, he has spent the last three decades trying to awaken from the nightmare of Irish history even as he has been drawn by the thin, insistent music--sound of fiddle, sound of drum--which serves as a ground bass to everything he writes. Brooklynborn, Ulster-raised, educated in Dublin and later at Yale, Iowa, and Berkeley, an "exile" who has spent years in Paris and Celtic Normandy, a man who has translated extensively the modern French poets and traveled widely throughout Europe and India, Canada and Central America, Montague--like Joyce...