Thomas Dillon Redshaw (Editor), Well Dreams: Essays on John Montague (Book Review‪)‬

Thomas Dillon Redshaw (editor), Well Dreams: Essays on John Montague. Omaha: Creighton University Press, 2004. 443 pages. USD 24. John Montague's long and prolific career as a leading voice in contemporary Irish letters, somewhat surprisingly, has not generated quite the same volume of critical attention as some of his Northern peers. Critical accounts of Montague, as Thomas Dillon Redshaw makes clear in his introduction to this timely and illuminating book, are somewhat fragmentary so that Redshaw's book is a welcome work of synthesis and consolidation. It is also, perhaps, an embarkation point for the academy from which to view the full extent of Montague's poetic oeuvre with essays ranging here from the early Forms of Exile (1958) to the close of the Collected Poems (1995) and beyond to Smashing the Piano (1999) but not Drunken Sailor (2004). Redshaw brings together a wealth of exegesis in twenty one essays, all but four of which are previously unpublished with a descriptive checklist by Redshaw of Montague's many and varied publications. It is hardly surprising that, on the evidence of this volume, some of Montague's most appreciative readers are leading American critics whose insights into the trans-Atlantic Montague are reminders of the poet's background and international outlook. Indeed, heritage and belonging are the recurrent themes which, from various viewpoints, most of these essays address. With Montague's career taking him from Brooklyn to Garvaghey to Dublin and France and back to the States, he is particularly attuned to the dynamics of place, to rootedness and rootlessness and, in many ways, his poetry mediates self-definition through feelings of displacement and a sense of belonging.