In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Nótaí na nEagarthóirí:Editors' Notes

The writer's vocation may be a solitary one, but few writers choose to follow the model of a Dickinson or a Kafka and never show their work. Still, as the novelist and poet Kerry Hardie (winner of the 2005 O'Shaughnessy Award) knows well, launching a new book into the world leaves one open to all manner of public criticism, some of it wildly misinformed. Here, Hardie—who concedes that she finds it difficult even to be in the same room with someone reading one of her books—ruminates on the peculiar and unsettling experience of being reviewed in a newspaper. Hardie wonders if reading unwelcome criticism might not, in the end, turn out to be a key to the creative process. Despite the "enforced self-awareness of publication," it may be the experience of being reviewed that bestows a kind of emotional and aesthetic distance that makes further writing possible. Kerry Hardie's second novel, The Bird Woman, appeared in 2006; her most recent volume of poems, Only This Room, was issued this Autumn by the Gallery Press.

The author of biographies of Daniel Corkery and D. P. Moran, the prolific researcher Dr. Patrick Maume often brings renewed attention to little-known writers, including earlier articles in this journal on Shan Bullock (1998), John H. Finlay (2002), and Canon Joseph Guinan (2005). In this issue, Maume surveys the work and thought of Lord Dunsany (1878–1957). Dunsany's stock has always remained high among devotees of fantasy fiction, but his real-world opinions—including diehard Unionism, an unabashed love of imperialism and aristocracy coupled with open disdain for native cultures, and a host of quirks and crotchets—left the Meath landlord out of sync with the zeitgeist of his day and of ours. Maume argues that Ireland, or Dunsany's thoughts on Ireland, can be discerned throughout his oeuvre. Sometimes this is explicit, as in the several Dunsany novels set there; elsewhere, it takes the shape of a naive hope that some places in the world, perhaps including Ireland, could prove "impervious to modernity." [End Page 5]

Something prayerful lurks in Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin's latest poems in this issue's "Filíocht Nua" section. In "Brother Felix Fabri," the monk strikes into flames his square list of those who "wanted prayers." Those names return "home," as do the wind, rain, and tides of "The Litany" that erode human institutions—courts and churches included. Twice the word "corbel," resonant of medieval church architecture, crops up in these poems, and images of a Madonna also recur: "a woman and a small child," and a woman "holding a child in each hand," as well as a mother crossing a border river who passes her child to "the far side."And in her tribute to Leland Bardwell, a child and mother brave a Dublin Street gripped by an epic frost. Earlier this year,Wake Forest University Press released a North American edition of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin's Selected Poems.

Novelists often prove in retrospect to have been the canaries-in-the-coal-mine that warn of danger when, superficially, all seems well. If so, contends Dr. Shirley Peterson, then two recent novels—Edna O'Brien's In the Forest (2002) and Patrick McCabe'sWinterwood (2006)—augur bleakly for the Irish sense of communitas. Both novels present an affluent modern Ireland that seeks to conceal, then struggles to understand, the consequences of an unadmitted collective trauma. In each, the darker realities of Irish life find fictional expression: O'Brien's Michen O'Kane is clearly modeled on Brendan O'Donnell, the killer of three in rural County Clare in 1994, while in Winterwood, the long-suppressed memories of molestation and murder strike chilling resonances with this summer's Ryan Report. A scholar of far-ranging interests, Shirley Peterson's articles have covered such topics as freaks in literature and the country singer Steve Earle. With Elizabeth Harrison, she co-edited Unmanning Modernism: Gendered Re-Readings (1997).

Ambitious young men and women today seem to be continually "networking," but their go-getter practice is scarcely new, as much recent historiography on...

pdf

Share