Company

The first in a two-volume memoir, "Company" takes as its theme the curious fact that as a young poet in 1950s Dublin and Paris, John Montague adopted "bohemia" as a surrogate family, having been abruptly separated at the age of four from his own family, and the country of his birth, America. Plunging into the bohemian world, he embraced older poets, the likes of Patrick Kavanagh and Robert Graves, as parent pictures. The ghosts of their friends who people "Company" include Samuel Beckett, his neighbour and friend in Paris for a decade, and the 'inspired lunatic', Brendan Bahan, in Dublin. The book begins with the much-neglected Mrs Yeats, "considering that she helped foster the greatest poet of the century", and ends with Montague's relationship with Ted Hughes.