Nótaí na nEagarthóirí: Editors' Notes

Poet James Liddy's autobiography The Doctor's House (2004) recounts his life in hurried, almost cinematic vignettes, a technique he employs again in his forthcoming memoir The Full Shilling. We open this issue with a suite of five short pieces from that volume, which tell of Liddy's bohemian apprenticeship in the Dublin of Kavanagh and Myles na gCopaleen. Liddy recalls an age of literary cabals, writerly gossip, exalted personality, and unchecked drinking bouts in all their confusion and irresistibility. One of the cornerstones of that world was Parson's Bookshop, which he elegizes in "The Left Bank at Baggot Street Bridge"—an irreplaceable milieu devoted to "The business of literature, the pleasure of 'news'." Now long established in Milwaukee, James Liddy's Collected Poems appeared in 1994, followed by Gold Set Dancing (2000) and On the Raft With Fr. Roseliep (2007).

At the close of World War II, Allied Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower toured Northern Ireland, where he acknowledged that without the province American forces might never have concentrated to invade Europe. Dr. Francis M. Carroll here surveys the war years in Northern Ireland, and notes that the enormous American presence was felt not only in the military campaign, but also in the diplomatic sphere—a situation complicated by the Free State's sedulous adherence to neutrality. Military construction and harbor preparation changed the infrastructure and even the landscape of Northern Ireland, not to mention the economic impact that hundreds of thousands of GIs brought to the region. And even as the war raged in Europe, individual Americans learned to get along with the Irish on a daily basis; among them some 1, 800 Northern Irish "war brides" by V-E Day. Francis Carroll's many books include The American Presence in Ulster: A Diplomatic History, 1796–1996 (2005).

Sinéad Morrissey's suite of new poems opens with the words "I look up," and an almost magical reverence for the act of looking infuses each of the poems in this issue. In one, we find the poet raising her head from a book of prescriptive grammar to rediscover the world in all its plenitude. In another, she revels in the surprise and visual dislocation that a simple kaleidoscope can provide; in "Ice," she is again astonished at the suddenly-unfamiliar sights of a world that has "spangled / itself in ice." One senses the poet's own appetite for the visual in her poem about her infant son, "Augustine Sleeping Before He Can Talk": there, the child delights in the lights and ornaments of a Christmas tree, "all clamouring to be experienced." A native of Portadown,County Armagh, Sinéad Morrissey is the author of three collections, including The State of the Prisons (2005). In 2007 she was awarded a Lannan Literary Fellowship.

It is no small challenge to pin down a place for the Anglo-Irish novelist and memoirist Elizabeth Bowen, either in the Irish canon or in the slippery world of critical esteem. Not only was Bowen herself uneasy with her divided identity, but as Dr. Heather Bryant Jordan admits, her work has also "lingered in a state of critical ambivalence, not unlike the one she herself inhabited." The steadily growing body of scholarship on Bowen and her masterful novels like The Last September (1929), the opening-up of her work to such theoretical perspectives as postcolonial analysis or gender politics, and the simple fact that her novels have continuously stayed in print all suggest that she will remain an appreciated author. Bowen herself might well take pride in this, for at the time of her death in 1973, she was acutely aware that her only heirs were her books. Heather Bryant Jordan is the author of How Will the Heart Endure: Elizabeth Bowen and the Landscape of War (1992).

It is a truism of intellectual history that matters that seem abstract and cerebral to later generations were, in their own day, highly charged and full of real-world consequence. The sermons of Bishop George Berkeley (1685–1753) on the matter of "passive obedience" are a good example. As Dr. Scott Breuninger shows, when Berkeley published...