Cover: Cludach

Made infamous for rainy dreariness in Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, the city of Limerick has transformed itself over the past two decades into a vibrant university town. Amid its refurbished Georgian streets and Shannon-side walks may be found notable museums and galleries: the Limerick City Museum, the Hunt Museum, and the Limerick City Gallery of Art on Pery Square. The covers of this sixth volume of New Hibernia Review will celebrate the city of Limerick by presenting artifacts and works from the city’s museums.

Our first issue for 2002 presents Jack Donovan’s large and vivid painting Poet Ryan, which has hung high on the wall of the Limerick City Museum’s main gallery since 1974. Measuring 122 × 91.5 cms, Donovan’s portrait depicts a legendary Limerick figure—the “People’s Poet” Michael D. Ryan, of Askeaton, who was known for his verses celebrating sports, music, and local history. Painting in oil on board, Donovan has seated the People’s Poet where he was wont to sit, in the corner seat of a pub with whiskey before him. The viewer cannot recognize this as The Sarsfield or any other pub, for Donovan has turned the setting into an abstraction emphasized by the plane of the table before Ryan. Even Ryan’s seated figure is generic. The setting provides a frame for a bravura act of painting. Donovan has delineated in detail and bright tones the poet’s head—the sacred Celtic head. Donovan catches Ryan’s glance—a forward glance that questions the viewer’s willingness to hear Ryan say a poem. Himself born in Limerick in 1934, Jack Donovan has exhibited throughout Ireland and, until lately, taught at the Limerick School of Art and Design.

The Limerick City Gallery of Art houses a rich permanent collection of Irish art and regularly gives over its new galleries to exhibitions of contemporary Irish and European art. The gallery occupies the Carnegie Building, which was constructed of stone in 1903 in neo-Romanesque style at the edge of the People’s Park. In 1998, this building was renovated and expanded. We thank the Limerick City Gallery of Art and its director, Michael Fitzpatrick, for the permission to reproduce Donovan’s painting on the cover of this issue of New Hibernia Review.