Voice from the Grave – Frank McNally on a debut poetry collection from Niall Montgomery, 38 years after his death.

Irish Times

19-06-2025

When Niall Montgomery died in 1987, an appreciation in this newspaper mentioned the imminent, posthumous publication of his first ever collection of poetry, 'ominously entitled
Terminal
'.
The appreciator, 'M.S.' (his friend and occasional publisher in magazines, Michael Smith), added: 'I cannot express the bitterness of my disappointment that he will not be alive to see it.'
But Smith needn't have worried because, for whatever reason, the thing Montgomery wasn't alive to see didn't appear then either. Instead, nearly 40 years later, a collection of the poems has only now finally seen the light, this time under the title
Terminal 1
.
While even more posthumous, it sounds less ominous than the 1987 version. If anything, it has taken on an ironic quality, thanks to the subtitle: 'Arrivals'. As it finally touches down, despite the four-decade delay, a Ryanair-style fanfare may be justified.
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The recurrent aviation terminology is explained in part by Montgomery's day job as an architect, in which role he worked under Desmond Fitzgerald on the masterpiece that is the original Dublin Airport terminal.
But Montgomery (1915 – 1987) was a man of many talents. A painter, sculptor, and influential literary critic, he was also an Irish Times columnist, doubly disguised, for many years.
First, on an unknown but substantial number of occasions, he stood in for his friend Brian O'Nolan, aka Myles na gCopaleen.
The possibility that any given edition of Cruiskeen Lawn could have been written by Montgomery or a third party has been credited with preserving
O'Nolan's
day job as a senior civil servant, at least until one too many attacks on his boss, the Minister for 'Yokel Government', precipitated his early retirement in 1953
Later, in the mid-1960s, Montgomery acquired his own Irish Times column, entitled The Liberties. For this he used the pseudonym Rosemary Lane, resulting in some indignant letters to the editor about 'Miss Lane's' opinions.
In fact, Rosemary Lane was a defunct Dublin address, once the site of a tavern in which furtive masses were said during penal times, and today occupied by the Church of the Immaculate Conception, better known to Dubliners (and those who've read the opening line of Joyce's Finnegans Wake) as 'Adam and Eve's'.
Alas, the short-lived column had obvious similarities in style to Cruiskeen Lawn – and why wouldn't it, since the author had so often deputised on that?
And when sub-editors place them side-by-side one day, it provoked a fit of angry paranoia in O'Nolan – not a well man by then anyway. Montgomery promptly relinquished the job and so the literary Rosemary Lane disappeared from the map too.
But Montgomery was also a reluctant poet: reluctant in the sense that he so revered the form, his own contributions had to be dragged out of him, by Smith and others.
As the editor of the belated collection, Joseph LaBine, notes, the obscurity of Montgomery's early work drew a backhanded compliment once from a young Samuel Beckett.
Criticising some better-known Irish poets of the time, Beckett named a few others of whom he knew 'nothing'. Then he singled out Montgomery's poetry, of which he knew 'nothing at all'. For Beckett, as LaBine jokes, there were degrees of nothingness: the kind applying to Montgomery was more absolute than the others.
That didn't last. As he had with Joyce, Montgomery became one of Ireland's most respected authorities on Beckett's work, and in the process a good friend of the writer.
Not only did Beckett come to know the architect well, he knew himself better in the process. After one epic essay ('a three-month job'), which Montgomery had sent to Paris for the subject's approval, Beckett responded: 'I learned a lot about myself I didn't know and hadn't suspected'.
By 1955, in a warm letter, Beckett looked forward to their meeting on a possible return to Dublin the following year, and lapsed into Hiberno-English: 'If I do, and the family dying dead, it's the quare times we'll be having.'
Montgomery wrote poems in both of Ireland's official languages and is not easy to read in either. He was a great admirer of jazz, drawing inspiration from it for his free, unconventional verse. He 'pays homage to Dublin and Joyce' (with a bit of Flann O'Brien too) LaBine notes, 'but his characteristic style, with its odd enjambment and capitalisation, anticipates beat poetry, particularly Allen Ginsberg's Howl (1956)'.
Less happily, his early poems feature occasional outbursts of apparent ant-Semitism and misogyny. This may have resulted in part of Montgomery's urge to challenge the strict censorship of his era, with which he had an unusually personal relationship: his father was appointed the Free State's first film censor in 1923.
Retaining certain offensive phrases 'for the sake of context', LaBine says: 'They should not be excused away but, in certain cases, are clearly the mistakes of a young poet.'
Like a jazz lyricist of more recent vintage, the late Paul Durcan, Montgomery was an entertainingly eccentric reader of his own work. Luckily, we still have recordings. Among those speaking at the very belated launch of his debut collection, in the Irish Architectural Archive on Friday evening, will be the man himself.