Description:
The poetry of John Montague has persistently explored questions of cultural, linguistic, and maternal origin. His poems concerning the mother as autobiographical character and mythic force have investigated as well the roles of father and son as both observers and participants in sexual process and birth. While repeatedly the mother appears as a figure of deprivation, in more recent collections mother and son also emerge as complicitous, guilty doubles. Occasionally reconciling male and female principles, his poems most frequently discover their own eloquent incapacity to realize the lost body of the mother.