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New Hibernia Review 7.3 (2003) 5-8



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Editors' Notes
Nótaí na nEagarthóirí


Known to many American readers for his encyclopedic, yet deeply personal volumes about Inis Mór, Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage and Stones of Aran: Labyrinth, Roundstone's Tim Robinson is a man of many parts—a naturalist, cartographer, artist, essayist, and most recently, in Tales and Imaginings (2002), a writer of fiction. In June, 2003, Robinson delivered a plenary address at the annual meeting of the American Conference for Irish Studies, held at the University of St Thomas. In that address, Robinson revisited an idea he first articulated in 2001, that of the Irish "echosphere"—his term for "the familiar reciprocity of land and people in Ireland." Here, New Hibernia Review is honored to present Robinson's thoughtful, cautionary assessment of Ireland's changed relation with the natural world. Readers who wish to learn more of Tim Robinson's writings and maps may wish to visit his web site at www.iol.ie/~tandmfl/

One of the enduring frustrations for those who seek to understand Northern Ireland is that the conflict there has so readily lent itself to such simplistic analysis as a "two tribes" interpretation. As Ciaran McClean notes here, there are many in the North who simply do not feel at home in the mainstream nationalist and Unionist camps. McClean argues that the short-lived Democratic Left Party, though never a major force in the province's electoral politics, nonetheless served to challenge monolithic sectarianism throughout the 1990s—and that its eventual failure and disbandment provide lessons on which future progressive movements may draw. Currently an activist with the Building Bridges cross-community group, Ciaran McClean is a graduate of the Peace and Conflict Studies program at Magee College.

Michael Coady's All Souls—first published in 1997 and reissued by Gallery Press in 2001 in a revised, expanded version—has been recognized as one of the most successful multigenre works to come out of Ireland since John Montague's The Rough Field. Blending poetry, memoir, fiction, and documentary material, Coady—a lifelong resident of Carrick-on-Suir, Tipperary—charts what Professor Daniel Tobin calls here a passage "beyond the particular center of his [End Page 5] inherited world." Tobin pays special attention to the long closing essay in All Souls, "The Uses of Memory," wherein Coady, in pursuing a long-vanished great-grandfather through the newspaper files and genealogical records of Philadelphia more than a century ago, both probes the double nature of the Irish diaspora and effects a healing across generations. Daniel Tobin has recently compiled and edited a definitive anthology of Irish-American poetry, forthcoming from the University of Notre Dame Press.

Enda Wyley's third collection of poems Diary of a Fat Man will soon be published by the Dedalus Press of Dublin. Two earlier collections, Eating Baby Jesus (1994) and Socrates in the Garden (1998) established her among a new generation of Dublin writers—a generation for whom Irish insularity is, at most, a fading memory, as "Two Women in Kosovo" shows here. Eating Baby Jesus features surreal manipulations of the speaking voice, while in Socrates in the Garden (1998) Wyley's lines and forms seek a looser texture to express her engagement both with the mysteries of affection and Ireland's civic life in the late 1990s. In her poems, Wyley mixes contemporary observation, allusions to Gaelic lore, to the Classics, and to contemporary details of Dublin life. A past winner of a British National Poetry Competition and of Australia's Vincent Buckley Prize, Enda Wyley is currently at work on All Things, a novel, and she has a children's book in press titled Boo and Bear.

The form of nature writing known as dinnsheanchas—that branch of Gaelic tradition that deals with the deep lore of places—both animates and continues to find development in the poetry of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, probably the most widely studied Irish-language poet writing today. Here, Dr. Donna Potts looks closely at a number of poems in which Ní Dhomhnaill invokes magical transformations, and finds...

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