[The Great Cloak is] a record of a love relationship, shifting from the historical embedding of The Rough Field into a more personal key; but though Montague is a finely accomplished poet, I found this latest collection somewhat disappointing…. [It] fails to achieve an adequate subtlety of response; its language is on the whole … highly inflected, rhetorically resonant …, but there seems some subtle mismatching between that linguistic force and the relative uncomplexity of "content."… Montague's imagery seems too rhetorical, explicit and "head-on" for his emotions; so that when he ends a poem about the breakdown of a relationship with 'We shall never be / what we were, again. / Old love's refrain.' one feels like saying well, quite—that's about as far as it goes. In poem after poem, the craft is channelled into a web of imagery which, while officially supporting the dominant feeling, in fact tends to...