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Irish Times
20-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Niall Montgomery ‘originated an Irish form of jazz-inspired sound poetry'
In June 2015, Christine O'Neill published An Irishwoman's Diary on architect, poet, artist and literary critic Niall Montgomery in The Irish Times . This piece and O'Neill's subsequent book, Niall Montgomery: Dublinman (Ashgate, 2015), mark the centenary of the author's birth and stand out as the best biographical work on Montgomery. But what about his poetry? When I first learned that Montgomery had put together a manuscript of poems shortly before his death, I was floored. The questions one asks oneself as an editor are: these poems, are they any good? Have they been published before? Will they make a splash? Wait, is the book already put together? Can I publish it? If the answer to these questions is yes, then one has the editorial equivalent of a slam dunk. READ MORE Niall Montgomery (June 24th, 1915 – March 11th, 1987) is well-known as a Dublin architect and literary scholar, but his poetry is seldom mentioned despite a sporadic publishing career that spanned more than five decades. Montgomery never published a book of his poems. Dublinman collects his essays on James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and Georgian Dublin. terminal 1: Arrivals – a book published by Flat Singles Press that will be launched in Dublin on June 20th – is the first collection of Montgomery's poetry in a trade edition. It was not a slam dunk job. Collecting the early poems was a difficult task. Montgomery's lack of book publication during his lifetime necessitated tracking down out-of-print magazines and searching for early drafts in archives in Ireland and the United States. It is a gross understatement to say Montgomery's poetry is 'under-appreciated', 'obscure seeming', 'abstract', 'modernist' and, if one is feeling generous, 'misunderstood'. The seven long poems included in the collection were difficult to find but their quality speaks for itself, though the pieces are complex and perhaps impenetrable for some readers. Some of them are 'ensemble pieces' that speak in many voices. They achieve an unprecedented integration of clashing poetic and demotic registers. Terminal 1: Arrivals, a posthumous collection by Irish poet Niall Montgomery It is also difficult to classify Montgomery's poetry because his poetic career passed through two distinct phases: a period of arrival during the 1930s and early 1940s when his work met with a significant early reception, and a second flowering in the early 1970s after struggling to publish for many years. In the first phase, Montgomery published in important journals and avant-garde magazines, including Contemporary Poetry and Prose , transition , Wales , Ireland To-day and Furioso . In 1970, Michael Smith and Trevor Joyce featured Montgomery's unpublished song-poem, London Transport (1939), in The Lace Curtain , along with two new poems. Smith would go on to publish Montgomery's later poems and essays in five separate issues of that magazine. This late, second-phase recognition revived Montgomery's hope of publishing a book-length collection and was followed by a small flourishing of new, short poems. He called the book project T E R M I N A L but died before it could be published. terminal 1 collects Montgomery's earliest published work for the first time with the other long poems he wrote during the 1930s. Taken from his most prolific period, these poems mark Montgomery's first significant poetic achievement and emphasise his use of the long form. Other posthumous collections are needed. A critical edition of Montgomery's Irish translations would do much to establish his substantial bilingual contribution to Irish poetry. A second volume of his later poetry focusing on his use of shorter forms is already underway. Montgomery was incredible while young. One might dismiss it as precociousness and laugh at how John Milton wanted to be considered a prodigy well into his thirties. You might not think it, but an entire volume on Montgomery's early career is justified. For example, in 1932, at the age of 17, he wrote to Eugene Jolas, editor of the by then well-known transition magazine which was publishing Joyce's Work in Progress as well as other expressionist, post-expressionist, Surrealist and Dada artists. Taking a cue from Joyce and what would become Finnegans Wake (1939), Jolas focused transition on experimental writing and provided an important forum for the international avant-garde. Montgomery's letter is best described as ardent fan mail, full of strange Latin-English wordplay. In his implied praise for transition , Montgomery clearly echoes Jolas's so-called 'interlinguistic experiments' and the magazine's announcement in 1932 that 'Poetry is vertical'. montgomery; 132 Rock Road Booterstown Dublin ; transeunti eugene jolas viaticum igitor rejoyce 13 mar 2 1 rue de sévigné paris (3e) dURINg an ad liminn brousing with some HORIZontal lenten PASTords i determined and REALised. ENclosed my camera PANS v e r t i c a l l y from the wreason of tsalty TSELIOT and EVEn contraeonceivARLY PAULtergeist vulAIRY I HAVE SICKERED ON THE SUBLIMINAL ETHOS orphically ad limina cheaply ex cathedra MANtically YoUrS Niall O'lstat Montgomery He had already made a name for himself as a poet by the summer of 1934, when under the name Andrew Belis, Beckett mentioned him in Recent Irish Poetry—an acerbic review for Bookman magazine—alongside several Irish poets who the author categorized as either outmoded revivalists or 'aware' artists. Beckett ironically claimed to know 'nothing' of the poetry of Niall Sheridan, Donagh MacDonagh or Irene Haugh but the mere mention of the names ambiguously sets them apart from the poets Beckett attacks in the review. Knowing nothing almost becomes a compliment when Beckett adds two words to Montgomery's 'nothing'; he writes, 'of Mr Niall Montgomery's poetry', he knows 'nothing at all'. Beckett and Montgomery's friendship began around this time and lasted for the rest of Montgomery's life. They became the sort of friends who exchange Christmas cards and know one another's family. Of his Dublin friends named in Beckett's review, Niall Sheridan was the most encouraging of Montgomery's poetry. He consoled Montgomery after his collection of translations had been rejected in 1934: sorry to hear that the GÚM refused your poems. Where the hell was the GÚM in 1916, anyway. I'd seriously advise you to publish them yourself. These poems were part of a monumental translation project. Christine O'Neil has documented Montgomery and Devlin's attempt in the early 1930s to translate 'more than 200 pages' of modernist and avant-garde French poetry into Irish, a corpus which, according to Tobias Harris, even 'included work by Tristan Tzara, the Romanian-born poet and performance artist who acted as a bridge between the Paris and Berlin Dada scenes'. Apart from the two translations included in the appendix terminal 1 , none of the Irish material has been published. I can make an even more shocking claim: Montgomery is more of a London poet, vis-à-vis The Waste Land, than a Dublin poet. He spent time in London in the late 1930s for his architectural training. With Montgomery's ensemble pieces from this period, like London Transport and Swing Tides of March This Time Darling, it is important to observe that he is writing as an expatriate rather than as a stay-at-home Dubliner. Sheridan wrote to him in London on January 16th, 1939, 'I'm terribly sorry for you living in that pagan country. Apart from missing you here [in Dublin], it's a terrible fate for anyone.' It is also true that a sense of the city of Dublin is inseparable from Niall Montgomery's name and from all his work. Some readers may first see 'London' and the influence of 'tsalty tseliot' before noticing 'whitewash and gorsecurves' and the distinctive Irishness of Montgomery's imagery. At different times, Montgomery likened his poetry to music ('TRANSPOSE it for me please it's still much too high'). He also deeply admired jazz. In an essay on painting published in 1944, he compared abstract painting and jazz: 'Both are very much of the twenties and thirties, [and] reflect the neuroses of contemporary life. At its best the dominant feature in jazz is improvisation, with the strange, unpredictable line of an instrumental solo against a rhythmic formalised bass; in 'abstract' art this startling flowing line informs the composition.' His understanding of jazz informs how music is employed in 'blinds somewhere draw the blinds' and Swing Tides of March This Time Darling. A bassline underpins rhythmic changes between stanzas in both poems. In one section of 'blinds' Montgomery establishes his analogy between jazz and writing with alto-bovine-absurdity: in the higher brackets however elastically scrolled in an uncountable rococo idiom steely and irrevocable behind the ogham stones seven secret cows in double-breasted dinner-jackets go atavistic on their tender saxophones In Swing Tides of March, big band music becomes a central motif ('trombone-routine of brekekekex-coagulation') and the text ends with a radio announcer signing off. London Transport is arguably Montgomery's most difficult poem. It is an ensemble piece that develops the polyvocal technique of Swing Tides of March in a more definite, and almost prescriptive style. One might say that Montgomery originated an Irish form of jazz-inspired sound poetry distinguished by its polyphony. The seven poems in terminal 1 are the mark of his poetic achievement. Joseph LaBine is a Canadian poet and scholar specialising in modern Celtic literature. TERMINAL 1: Arrivals by Niall Montgomery, edited by Joseph LaBine, is published by Flat Singles Press.
Irish Times
19-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Voice from the Grave – Frank McNally on a debut poetry collection from Niall Montgomery, 38 years after his death.
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. READ MORE 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.
