[Although] The Rough Field appears, at first glance, to be a collection of poems of great formal variety, it soon reveals itself as a prolonged meditation on a single theme: the death of a culture. This is one of several themes that have preoccupied Montague in his previous books … and here finds its fullest expression. Now and then one comes across a section that previously appeared in an earlier volume; but where this happens one is conscious of a self-contained poem growing in stature in relation to its new context. One doesn't read at random. The poem must be read consecutively, for it has a cumulative effect, gathering momentum as it proceeds. There are seventy pages of it, a carefully planned structure, and one puts it down with the realization that this is something very unusual, on this (Eastern) side of the Atlantic at least, where the younger...