‘I am a small boy standing in a field.

Where is my mother? Where is my father?’

The late John Montague’s collection of new poems circles back to familiar subjects, his childhood in Ulster and his recognition that a family fracture was reflected in divisions within his surrounding society. It includes explorations of childhood and adolescence with its awakening sexuality.

Other poems contemplate Gerard Manley Hopkins in Dublin and remember John Berryman in Dublin and Paris and, in the more substantial ‘Scotia’, another old friend, Hugh McDiarmid.

The book’s second section continues John Montague’s recollections by reconstructing pilgrimages to and conversations with the poet and artist David Jones (1895-1974).

Second Childhood, is being published on what would have been his 88th birthday, a windfall from one of Ireland’s revered and best loved poets.