Writing the province: David Jones, John Montague, Seamus Heaney

The publication of ‘The Great Bell’, a poetic sequence about his encounters with the Anglo-Welsh poet David Jones, in John Montague’s last collection serves as a helpful reminder of the significance of Jones’s work for writers in the late 1960s and 70s. Jones’s unique experiments with a hybrid style that operates between prose and poetry, and his ‘archaeological’ approaches to the history and numinous legacy of ‘these isles’ as he cast them, all had impact within poetry from Britain and Ireland at this point. This article discusses Jones’s vital presence in poetry created from Northern Ireland from the period, focusing on the technical solutions and coterminous historical stances adopted in several of its most telling works – Montague’s own The Rough Field (1972) and Seamus Heaney’s North (1975).