Henri Cole New Yorker

"The books, only a fraction of his personal library, with their annotations and bulging reviews of the period, create a sort of mystique of Montague’s life. Apart from his work they constitute the best description of his nature. Among the papers were cards and love-notes from old girlfriends (mainly American), manuscripts of some poems, a letter that he’d never opened from Oxford University Press offering £250 for a story, letters from several young Dublin poets, old French postal wrappers from his fastidious first wife, timetables, lists of students’ names for seminars, a note from Evelyn, dated January 1987, saying that she couldn’t collect him because her car was snowed in, souvenirs from the Rotterdam Festival 1973, a catalogue of a sculpture exhibition with an introduction by Ezra Pound. All of this is just a partial list, a selection from the life of a successful international academic poet. Of course, it was his ‘office’, his teaching library, so that the selection of books was painfully academic and pedantic. There wasn’t even one book on flowers or gardens or show business; nothing even remotely erotic or kept for pleasure." Thomas McCarthy Irish Times