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  • Clúdach:Cover

The covers of New Hibernia Review's eleventh volume have featured the work of the American engraver John DePol (1913–2004). DePol repeatedly returned to Irish themes over the course of his long career. Probably best known for his lithographs and engravings of New York City; DePol was also associated with the Ben Franklin Keepsake editions for the annual New York Printing Week celebration, which he began illustrating in 1953 and continued for another thirty years. We close our selection of DePol's Irish works with a late engraving, prepared for the 1996 novella Inishbream by the Canadian writer Theresa Kishkan. The original fine press edition from Barbarian Press of Mission, British Columbia, featured twenty-six engravings by DePol, and was limited to 175 copies. Ninety-six pages in length, it measured 10 x 6 inches. A trade paperback edition of the book was released by Goose Lane Editions in 2001.

Kishkan's novella concerns a fictionalized island community in its last days before relocation to the mainland. In our cover image, the floating lobster pot that is the focal point floats tentatively on the waves, the shapes of which are echoed in the line of hills in the horizon and the lowering clouds above. While this scene of fishermen setting out lobster pots might well be set any island in Ireland's West, it is the vulnerability of the lobster pot in this elemental scene that captures the heart of Kishkan's story: the insustainabilty of traditional life in the face of relentless modernity. Other important literary works that involve the abandoning of an Irish island are Brian Friel's 1971 play The Gentle Island (1971), and Colin Moreton's nonfiction Hungry for Home: Leaving the Blaskets (2000).

We are grateful to Thelma DePol and Patricia G. DePol for kind permission to reproduce this engraving, and to the Special Collections Department of University of Delaware Libraries, which holds the John DePol papers. Of particular interest to the readers of this journal are the collection's extensive holdings in Irish literature from the 1700s to the present.

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