Nótaí na nEagarthóirí: Editors’ Notes

The emotional and narrative force of much recent Irish autobiography—whether that be McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes (1996),O’Faolain’s Are You Somebody? (1996), or the Irish-American Michael Patrick MacDonald’s All Souls (2000)—lies in the sheer audacity of speaking what has always been silenced. The same impulse lies at the heart of Dr. Brian Nerney’s memoir “Stories from Down Cellar,” a tale that concerns the murder of his grandmother’s sister—Mamie Murphy, an immigrant’s daughter—in New York City in 1891. When Nerney probes beneath the family story to its bedrock facts, he becomes frustrated with how his Irish-American family’s respectability devolved into a defensive insistence on propriety; now, in the very act of disclosing the entrenched secrets, he creates a new family story that illustrates his generation’s appetite for candor over respectability. Brian Nerney’s research interests focus on nonfiction and especially the literature of place; he is active in the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment.

Anyone planning a vacation today is apt to encounter glossy brochures, fawning travelogues, and color-saturated web sites devised to shield the would-be traveler from any hint of poverty off the beaten path. Elizabeth Meloy finds that, in Irish travel writing in the years after the Great Famine, the literature of tourism promotion also manipulated reality, but not by erasure. Rather, when confronted with visible evidence of Ireland’s harsh recent past, travel writers of the 1850s—with sometimes breathtaking blitheness—chose to look on the blasted landscape as a ripe field for future development. They suggested that difficult passage through famine ruins could be endured, she observes, “as long as the traveler kept the promise of Ireland’s prosperity constantly in mind.” A regular presenter at meetings of the American Conference for Irish Studies and elsewhere, Elizabeth Meloy contributed several articles to the 2003 volume Everything Irish.

Seán Lysaght, born in Limerick in 1957 and now living in rural County Mayo, writes poetry attuned to Ireland’s deep inheritances of natural and human history, and his alertness to such valences of meaning shines though in the ten “Sonnets to Edmund Spenser” gathered here. In this sequence, Lysaght takes the Elizabethan poet as his point of departure, but he gives us Spenser in several registers: the dutiful colonizer and apologist for the slaughter at Smerwick, and the workaday Spenser who kept sheep and planted orchards. Throughout, Lysaght interleaves both the late sixteenth century and his own life in its dailiness and detail. In the last of these sonnets, he visits the ruins of Kilcoman, where Spenser lived—a place where the poet is both everywhere and nowhere. The University of St. Thomas presented the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry to Seán Lysaght in 2007; his most recent collections are The Mouth of a River (2007) and Venetian Epigrams (2008).

Frank O’Connor’s outspoken history of Irish literature, A Backward Look (1967) stresses that a heightened sense of orality can be tracked across centuries of Irish writing. Dr. Eileen Morgan-Zayachek examines O’Connor’s bridging of the spoken and the written word in his work for Radio Éireann, the fledgling Irish broadcast service, during the years of the Emergency; later O’Connor would write that the wireless “was the most important thing that had happened to literature since the invention of printing.” Convinced that modernist fiction suffered from artificiality, O’Connor sought to restore the immediacy and narrative force of the Gaelic shanachie’s voice; a close reading of his stories collected in Three Tales (1931) reveals that O’Connor consciously shaped his fiction to evoke the best of the storyteller’s art. Eileen Morgan-Zayachek’s articles on Irish literature and broadcasting have appeared in such journals as Theater Survey, New Hibernia Review, and History Ireland.

“In contemporary, late-modern Ireland,” writes Dr. Michael Cronin, “changes in perceptions and experiences of place and time are having real-world consequences,” and here he ruminates on the ways such changes play out in the shifting social and psychic terrains of our day. Weaving together...