Nótaí na nEagarthóirí: Editors’ Notes

Discovering the universal in the particularity of place has long been a concern for poet Michael Coady, who roots his work in his home of Carrick-on-Suir, County Tipperary. In All Souls (1997) and especially One Another (2003), his poems are flanked by prose passages that evoke a distinctive oral cultural expression, in all its localism and essentially Irish rhythm. Coady will continue his experiments in vernacular in his next collection, A Litany for Monsieur Sax, due this autumn from the Gallery Press. We open this issue with three such vignettes from that book, each of which displays Coady’s profound sense of mutability. Lurking behind these tranches de vie is the saddening realization that such speech is being homogenized out of existence; and behind that, a poignant sense of the rhythm of life and the certainty of death, all present in the overarching metaphor of the tidal river. Michael Coady received the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry presented by the University of St. Thomas in 2004.

Low-circulation and often short-lived “little magazines” have exerted an outsized influence on literary history; a familiar example would be the Little Review’s serialization of Ulysses. Here, Dr. Bernard McKenna looks closely at one such magazine, To-Morrow, an ambitious periodical that vanished after two issues in 1924, but which in its brief life featured an early version of a key poem in the Yeatsian canon, “Leda and the Swan.” The full significance of its appearance there, McKenna notes, is to be found by looking at its context; in choosing to place “Leda” surrounded by thematically similar works from Lennox Robinson, Liam O’Flaherty, Francis Stuart, and others, Yeats provides a strong clue to the poem’s distinction between consensual sex and rape. Bernard McKenna has published widely on both Irish and Caribbean literature, in such journals as Philological Quarterly and LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory.

Dr. Margaret Ó hÓgartaigh has published widely on the history of Irish education, and her 2006 book Kathleen Lynn: Irishwoman, Patriot, Doctor described the career of a Dublin woman who received her medical degree in 1899. In this issue, Ó hÓgartaigh takes note of the far-reaching change in Irish education that made her career, and the careers of many other women, possible: the opening up of university education. In the half-century prior to 1930, Irish second- and third-level schools moved away from an emphasis on “refinement” and domesticity in the education of female students, and toward a steady expansion of opportunities to prepare young women to enter such professions as health and education. There were, of course, obstacles, among them curricular restrictions that kept women out of certain university courses, and a fee-paying system that favored the already well-off; but taken as a whole, women of the time benefited from a quiet revolution in Irish higher education.

Anne Fitzgerald’s poetry races up against the present fine manners of the Irish well-made poem, even though it works traditional materials, as in “Mass Rock at Glenstal,” or gossips in Dublin accents, as in “Ryan Lacken of Lackabeg.” The tumble of language with grammar in Fitzgerald’s lines carefully switches referents and unfolds syntax. In other hands, the Beckettian rant of “Quack-Doctoring” would come out as no more than just a skinny list of ailments and cures; here, they contain “nothing then silence.” And in “Slow Motion,” the lyric allusions to others—El Greco drawing, Galileo spying—fill the lines with a riot of suggestibility, though the poem depends on the cruelly careful phrase “good / bye bye.” A frequent teacher and anthologist of poetry by young adults, Anne Fitzgerald’s poems are collected in Swimming Lessons (2001) and The Map of Everything (2006).

Since 1994, a veritable Niagara of commentary has poured forth to explain the phenomenon of Riverdance—“the auditory signature of a new Ireland”—but little of it pays attention to a central fact: that, fundamentally, it is a work of music. In this issue we assemble three short essays that consider Bill Whelan’s composition from a musicological point of view. First, Dr. James Flannery—a...