Nótaí na nEagarthóirí: Editors' Notes

In his lifetime, Edmund Spenser (1552–99) was considered "the prince of poets," and though less exalted today, he is far from forgotten. In recent decades much of the critical attention afforded Spenser has come from Ireland, where the poet lived much of his life, and where he wrote his infamous View of the Present State of Ireland around 1594–95. As we open this issue, Oona Frawley pauses to ruminate on Spenser's "trace in Irish cultural memory," and on her own evolving relationship with the formidable author of The Faerie Queene. First as a graduate student in New York, and now as a scholar in Ireland, Frawley finds herself inexplicably drawn to this shadowy figure. In sifting through the fragmentary, sometimes imagined "facts" we possess about Spenser, she comes to realize how much we remember culturally shapes our subsequent readings. Dr. Oona Frawley is the author of Irish Pastoral: Nostalgia in Twentieth Century Irish Literature (2005).

Partition was, of course, the most contentious issue to arise from the Treaty that concluded the Anglo-Irish War; but, as Dr. Timothy O'Neil notes, it was far from the only controversial concession. Another was the agreement, under Article 5, to reimburse Britain for war expenses and to compensate Unionist landowners for damaged property. The cost of these reimbursements—£250,000 annually for sixty years—would fall squarely on Irish farmers in the new Free State. For the uncompromising republican Peadar O'Donnell, resistance to these annuities promised the means to launch a social revolution and topple the Cumann na nGaedheal government. In the end, however, O'Donnell watched de Valéra's Fianna Fáil party effectively co-opt the issue, and use it to bring their less ideological strain of "negotiable republicanism" into power a mere nine years after the civil war. Timothy O'Neil's articles on Irish labor at home and abroad have appeared in such journals as Saothar, Éire-Ireland, and in New Directions in Irish-American History (2001).

The author of numerous books and articles on Irish literature—including The Myth of an Irish Cinema, forthcoming from Syracuse University Press in 2008—Dr. Michael Patrick Gillespie looks with characteristic provocativeness at the placeless quality of much recent Irish cinema. He asserts that for purposes of interpretation, "middle-class movies set in contemporary Ireland can no longer be usefully classified as 'Irish' motion pictures." As cosmopolitanism and affluence wash away familiar markers of Irish distinctiveness, filmmakers seeking to represent contemporary Ireland are hard-pressed to attain anything like the geographic specificity of, say, Joyce's Ulysses. One notable exception, Gillespie contends, is director Lenny Abrahamson's 2004 film Adam and Paul. Set in the grittiest of Dublin subcultures, the underworld of heroin addicts, Adam and Paul tracks the day of two aimless addicts as they peregrinate across Dublin; in their tragicomic story the film both creates a world that cannot be transposed elsewhere, and provides the means of interpreting itself.

Now living in Conamara, Louis de Paor spent nine years in Australia, where his first selected poems, Aimsir Bhreicneach / Freckled Weather was published by the Leros Press in 1993. A Greeadadh Bas sa Reilg / Clapping in the Cemetery (2005) marked off de Paor's return out of the Irish diaspora to the heart of Ireland and to its first language. Likewise, the poems selected here from his recent work look at the Ireland of the present—"in Uachtar Ard aréir," / "in Oughterard today"or "I d'Teach Laighean" / "in Leinster House"—rather than back over the waves at Ireland of the Departures. De Paor's English lines are plain and spare; his Irish lines are rich in chiming syllables. Both serve easily the personal lyric, but in poems like "After the Revolution" de Paor aims at the social, political, and critical as well. The Center for Irish Studies at the University of St. Thomas recognized the stature of de Paor's poetry with the 2000 Lawrence O'Shaughnessy Award for Poetry.

The economic boom of present-day Ireland is all the more startling for having followed on centuries of poverty and economic woe. Here, Dr...