Nótaí na nEagarthóirí: Editors' Notes

Growing up in Dublin in the 1960s and '70s, the poet Siobhán Campbell was well aware that she lived in a world of borders—the geographic one that stood between her family and their relatives in the North, and also the borders of decorum, propriety, and identity. In an engaging, unspooling memoir, she teases out several sorts of boundaries that she and her family felt. These days, Brexit and speculation about what it will mean for the Irish border is on everyone's lips, but Campbell reminds us that internalized borders can be just as potent—yet, as she matured, Campbell found that even supposedly intractable borders have a way of growing permeable: petty smuggling (some of it ingenious in its deception) became almost a game for her family, family secrets eventually came to light, and tribal identities slowly broke down over generations. The most recent of Siobhán Campbell's five books of poetry is Heat Signature (2017).

The cultural shifts wrought by the internet most assuredly extend to Ireland, now a profoundly "wired" nation: today's Irish homes, it's been said, are more likely to be illumined by the blue glow of a laptop than by the red of a Sacred Heart candle. Dr. Catherine Maignant surveys the interplay of the Catholic church in Ireland with the new world of electronic media. Though some might think the Vatican the very definition of a slow-moving institution, the fact is that the church was quick to embrace the new media. In Ireland, the Jesuit order took the lead in going online, and Irish bishops have been enthusiastic promoters of a digital dimension to the church. Such developments as virtual pilgrimages and online prayer communities raise complex questions of theology and about the phenomenology of faith. Maignant concludes that, however promising the new media may seem to religious leaders, there is scant reason to think the internet will mitigate (let alone solve) the current crises in the Irish Catholic church. Catherine Maignant frequently contributes to Études Irlandaises; among her many publications on religion in Ireland is a chapter on the 2017 volume Tracing the Legacy of Irish Catholicism.

In the turbulent first decade of the Free State, the success of Irish democracy was by no means certain. Dr. Jason Knirck has written extensively on this period, in his monograph Afterimage of the Revolution: Cumann na nGaedheal and Irish Politics 1922–32 (2015), in Imagining Ireland's Independence: The Debates Over the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 (2006), and in articles in New Hibernia Review and Éire-Ireland. Here, he considers a key role played by the nascent Labour Party in the early Dáils—that of a loyal opposition. Drawing the Dáil Debates and on journalism, especially the party's own Voice of Labour, Knirck shows how crucial that role would prove in legitimizing the very processes of government. "Without a true foil for Cumann na nGaedheal in the Dail during the anti-Treaty abstention," he argues, "it is difficult to see how democracy could have taken root in Ireland as quickly as it did. Labour was the only party that could fulfill this function."

The speaker in Lorna Shaughnessy's "Dry Stone Walls" says that it feels "as if the whole word we inhabited was a made of a landscape of fissured rock." A similar rivenness runs through many of the poems presented here, starting with the opening lines of "Resettlement," where the "jagged edges of pots" prove "Broken as the promises forgotten / by those who made them"—or in "Semi-Precious," which opens, "like rivers in rock we have gouged deep channels in one another." Even in her poems that appear to seek comfort in the natural world, an underlying loneliness runs near the surface. These poems probe the deep ironies of human connection: love tears us and scars us, yet we seek it. Lorna Shaughnessy's collections, all from Salmon, are Torching The Brown River (2008), The Witness Tree (2011), and Anchored (2015). She has also translated extensively from Spanish and Galician poets.

The interdisciplinary movement known as the material turn underpins Dr. Jesse...