Editors' Notes: Notaí na nEagarthoiri

Aífe Murray, a poet and artist living in San Francisco, opens this issue by casting her eye across the landscape of South Tipperary, a place of origins for an unpredictable line of literary descent. For the past decade Murray has been immersed in recovering the long-silenced voice of Margaret Maher. An immigrant domestic from the Slievenamon countryside, Maher found her way into the kitchen of Emily Dickinson and, from there, into the poems that are so canonically American. For Murray herself, however, the townlands that Maher left a century and a half ago also become a place of closure and of restored connectedness. Aífe Murray has just completed a book-length study of Maher and Dickinson; her earlier articles on the subject have appeared in Signs and The American Voice.

Not a St. Patrick's Day passes without a revival, often on the airwaves of public television, of John Ford's 1952 classic film The Quiet Man. Conventional readings of the film hold that director Ford—born Seán Aloysius O'Fearna—and a cast of redoubtable Irish and Irish-American actors apotheosized any number of Irish stereotypes in the making of their classic. Michael Patrick Gillespie asks us to resist such reductive analyses, because, as he shows here, the film also offers "a relentless analysis of the complex nature of myth and custom in Ireland." The holder of Marquette University's Louise Edna Goeden Chair of English, Dr. Gillespie has written or edited ten books, the most recent of which is Reading William Kennedy (2002).

Writing from Belfast, Chris Agee gives us a suite of allusive and challenging poems that employ broken forms and multiple voices to face up to the shattering effects of ethnic conflict—but in "the former Yugoslavia" rather than Northern Ireland. Paired here are two environmental elegeies. One, dedicated to the naturalist and journalist Michael Viney, surveys the landscape of Donegal; the other, surveys the killing ground around Pristina. For Agee, the millennium begins in threnody. Currently at work on a prose memoir titled "Journey to Bosnia," Agee edited the Bloodaxe anthology Scar on the Stone: Contemporary Poetry from Bosnia (1995). Chris Agee's prior collections are The New Hampshire Woods, from Deadlus Press, and the chapbook The Sierra de Zacatecas, from Editions Papeles Privados (1995). Chris Agee's forthcoming collection is titled First Light.

To the casual observer, the politics of Northern Ireland presents a bewildering alphabet soup of political parties and organizations, all exclusively male until very recent times. A new and—to entrenched politcians in the North—unexpectedly potent entity since 1996 has been the Northern Ireland Women's Coalition or NIWC. Herself a one-time election volunteer for the NIWC, Dr. Constance Rynder recounts here the coming together in the 1990s of a cross-communal women's political agenda that has challenged the province's historic divides and succeeded in electing Monica McWilliams and Jane Morrice to the first Legislative Assembly on Northern Ireland. Professor Rynder's publications on women's history include articles on the ballerina Maria Tallchief and the Mohawk clan mother Molly Brant. More recently, Dr. Rynder's essay on the Seneca Falls convention of 1848 appeared in American History.

Even when abstracted from the political and cultural contents of its original performance, Brendan Behan's 1956 masterpiece The Quare Fellow remains a powerful drama of prison life and a telling indictment of capital punishment. Yet, as Richard Rankin Russell notes, even some of the most astute critics of Irish drama have not realized that Behan's is also "a protest against the continuing Anglicization of Ireland." Starting from the little-noted detail that the title character's first language is Irish—most probably the Kerry Irish of the Blasket Islands—Dr. Russell argues that Behan's play may best be understood as an "anticolonial" drama rather than a postcolonial one because of the presence in it of linering colonial elements that the play critiques. Behan's The Quare Fellow is heir to...