We are upgrading our website. Please click here for the new version.

Meet the Press »


New Titles »

Upcoming Titles »

Catalogue »

Rare & Collectible »

Featured Books »

Ordering Info »

Shipping Info »

Order Form »

Book Club »


News »

Special Events »

Contact Us »



The Great Cloak

    by John Montague The Great Cloak

"One can only set up against [Montague] the great love poems: Chaucer's superb lyric, the most formidable of Shakespeare's Sonnets and a scattering from other Elizabethans and Cavaliers, together with a few poems each from Burns, Byron, Shelley, Landor, Browning, Meredith and Yeats.… From this time on, whatever else he may write, John Montague's voice will always be raised in the ranks of the great poets of our literature." Robin Skelton, Malahat Review



The Great Cloak
for Evelyn

Smooth and long to swathe
a handsome woman's body,
a shape tall as a bell,
obedient to a fingernail.

Or to encompass her lover
as well, snug as flea deep
in featherbed, while their bodies
converse, on a green slope.

Or when the baby is born
to wrap the morsel tenderly
while beasts browse around them
naturally as in Bethlehem.



63 pages

1978

$6.95 paperback (Second printing)
ISBN 0-916390-07-1
ISBN13 978-0-916390-07-5

Order this book

Click here for a biography and all available books by John Montague


Wake Forest University • Winston-Salem, North Carolina