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John Montague (1929–2016), who has died at the age of eighty-seven, was one of the leading figures in the extraordinary flowering of poetry in Northern Ireland from the 1960s on. His book The Rough Field (1972), with its vision of the violent history of Ulster persisting into the present, had a profound influence on the slightly younger generation of Irish poets who were then coming into their own and included Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon and Paul Muldoon. Montague led the way, too, in his cosmopolitanism – born in Brooklyn, he was brought up in Co Tyrone and lived for much of his earlier life in Paris, where he became a drinking companion of Samuel Beckett and known as a sensitive and resourceful translator of contemporary French poetry. He enjoyed many friendships and academic honours in the United States and met his third wife, Elizabeth Wassell, at one of his readings…
