Nótaí na nEagarthóirí: Editors’ Notes

With the publication of Irish Nocturnes in 1999 (followed by four more collections, including 2009’s Words of the Grey Wind), Chris Arthur established himself as one of Ireland’s most tireless advocates for the essay form and its essential open-endedness. We see this well in “Level Crossing,” the meditative piece that opens this issue. Starting with an unexpected discovery about a raptor rarely seen in Ireland, the gyrfalcon, Arthur allows us to watch the free play of thought and association that has defined the essay since Montaigne invented the genre. Arthur’s essay invokes both the distinctiveness of place—his youth in Lisburn and friendship with a beloved teacher, the late Arnold Benington—as well as his commitment to learning from far-flung influences, among them zoology, quaternary studies, Buddhism, science fiction, and birdwatching. Throughout, Arthur grapples with a larger question posed by an essayist he admires, Sam Pickering: What is the right distance at which to view things?

Among students of American Indians, the pioneering ethnographic research of the Smithsonian Institution’s James Mooney (1861–1921) continues to stand as a landmark of early ethnography. Less well-known are Mooney’s earliest forays into collecting and folklore, involving Irish medical lore, funeral practices, and holiday traditions, which appeared in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. Dr. Pádraig Ó Siadhail reviews these early articles for us, and finds that the American-born Mooney made a notable contribution to Irish folklore studies. An enthusiastic amateur, rather than a trained ethnologist, Mooney’s reputation as a collector is eclipsed by that of his near-contemporary Jeremiah Curtin. Despite Money’s imperfect command of Irish and occasional methodological missteps, the Irish articles fine-tuned the scholarly talents that would serve him so well in his Indian researches. Pádraig Ó Siadhail holds the D’Arcy McGee Chair of Irish Studies at Saint Mary’s University. He is the current president of the Canadian Association for Irish Studies, and the author of An Béaslaíoch: Beatha agus Saothar Phiarais Béaslaí, 1881–1965 (2007).

Jean O’Brien’s third collection Lovely Legs appeared this year from Salmon Press, following on Dangerous Dresses (2005) and The Shadow Keeper (1997), as well as two chapbooks. Images of fixedness, even imprisonment, recur in the first several poems she gives us here: the claustrophobic Winter of “Snow Ciphers,” where “Mostly we stay cooped up, locked in / braving the chill only to chip away / at frozen coal”; a trapped butterfly in “Scandinavian Dream”; a spider’s web; and in “Out of his Element,” a literal fish-out-of-water “stranded on grass” And yet, we do not leave this suite of poems feeling confined, for O’Brien’s poems are also resonant of small epiphanies and earned gratitude. The last poem, “Left Over Christmas Trees,” quietly praises the comfort of writing itself: “Paper never refuses ink. / No matter how hard the words, / it just absorbs.”

The Irish landscape, notes Dr. Eoin Flannery, “bespeaks a culture of discontinuous and unsettled histories,” and among the most powerful of these disruptions was the famine institution of the poorhouse—the ruins of which still dot the countryside today. Eugene McCabe’s Tales from the Poorhouse (1999) comprises four distinct, but linked, first-person narratives that chillingly evoke life in and around these Gothic environs. Central to the tales are the Brady sisters, inmates of the workhouse whose unabashed sexuality amid death and decay is both animalistic and oddly future-oriented—a bifurcated figuring of the female body that, as Flannery shows, is wholly of a piece with the Gothic genre. Taken as a whole, Flannery finds, the partial narrative of McCabe’s fictions make real the forgotten dead. Eoin Flannery is the author of numerous articles on contemporary Irish fiction. His books include Ireland and Postcolonial Studies: Theory, Discourse, Utopia (2009), and the forthcoming Colum McCann and The Aesthetics of Redemption, to be published next year.

Until now, any mention of the word “tenement” in connection with the Abbey Theatre would almost certainly evoke the Sean O’Casey’s famed trilogy—but as Dr. Elizabeth Mannion’s article reveals, the...