Nótaí na nEagarthóirí: Editors' Notes

Emigration was a fact of Irish life for most of the past two centuries, and yet, at the "micro" level of the family, it has frequently been consigned to a cul-de-sac of silence and willful forgetting. Christine Cusick opens this issue with a memoir that tells of a moment when that wall of silence was lowered as, following the death of her mother, Cusick took time from her graduate studies to travel with her father and other members of her family to Ireland. Although there was no agenda to visit her grandfather's home town of Tourmakeady, County Mayo, the family found themselves inexplicably drawn there—where together, they faced an old and unadmitted wound that could, at last, begin to heal. These personal stories, Cusick reflects, should not—and probably cannot—be kept out of our academic postures. Currently editing a volume on Irish ecocriticism, Dr.Cusick wrote on the poet Moya Cannon in New Hibernia Review in 2005.

Remembered today chiefly as the editor of genius who recruited the unknown Brian O'Nolan to write the "Cruiskeen Lawn" columns for the Irish Times, R.M. Smyllie assumed the editorship of what is now considered Ireland's national newspaper in 1934. Dr. Caleb Richardson describes the extraordinary transformation that Smylle worked on the paper over the next two decades. The paper he inherited was a fusty relic of a decaying Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, well on its way to irrelevance in national life. With panache and good humor, with an eye for journalistic talent, with political courage that included a willingness to take on the sacred cows of the new Free State, and with heroic eccentricity, Smyllie succeeded in "making the Irish Times matter to modern Ireland." Richardson is currently revising his dissertation, "That is Only War: Irish Writers and the Second World War," for publication.

Born in Listowel, County Kerry, in 1973, over the past decade John McAuliffe's steady contributions to poetry journals in Ireland, Britain, and the United States have confirmed the promise of his 2000 "Poet of the Future" award from RTÉ. Formerly director of the Dun Laoghaire Poetry Festival, and now teaching at the University of Manchester, McAuliffe has published two collections with Gallery Press, A Better Life, (2002) and this year's Next Door. In the new poems presented here, we find McAuliffe probing, with perceptive wit, contemporary tensions between motion, dislocation, and place: spotting himself in the rearview mirror in "Road Safety," or recording a hard slog through traffic to a family picnic in "A Hundred Towns." Yet, in poems like "A Minute," an elusive stillness also beckons: "before I fumble, in two minds, for the mobile / and directions, I've a minute to consider / the roads Sunday-quiet. . . ."

It has become a truism to observe that the pastoral landscapes of Ireland often belie its violent past, as shown, for example, by successive waves of agrarian rebellion in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The origins of one of the most violent of these rebellions are the concern of James S. Donnelly, Jr., in his essay on the early followers of "Captain Rock," the mythical leader of the agrarian upheaval of 1821–24. Donnelly shows that the ruthless behavior of the land agent Alexander Hoskins prompted a whole series of violent incidents on the estates of Viscount Courtenay around Newcastle West in County Limerick. The resistance to Hoskins and his assistants came not only from the many subtenants on Courtenay's estates but even, quite remarkably, from the Protestant middlemen whose interests Hoskins assailed. These events set off a much wider explosion of violence propelled by an incendiary combination of millennial predictions of Protestant doom, intense sectarian hostility, and a severe agricultural depression spanning the years 1819–23. Dr. Donnelly's numerous publications include such important works as The Land and the People of Nineteenth-Century Cork: The Rural Economy and the Land Question (1975); The Great Irish Potato Famine (2001); and the magisterial Encyclopedia of Irish History and Culture (2004), for which he served as editor-in-chief.

Few American publications played the role of cultural...