Editors' Notes: Notai na nEagarthoiri

Poet, raconteur, émigré academic, James Liddy was in at the start of Irish Studies in the United States in the 1960s. Educated to the Dublin bar, Liddy followed his mother's heritage back to the United States, but not into the high American Irish society of the East Coast that Harry Sylvester lightly fictionalizes in the romance of Moon Gaffney. Not only does Dorothy Day appear in Sylvester's pages, but also Liddy's own uncles and cousins. Here, Liddy points up the many ways in which Sylvester's 1947 novel offers readers of satire and social history an image of Irish America that counters those working -class fictions rendered by such writers as James Farrell or Maureen Howard. Indeed, in its veiled focus on diocesan and Tammany politics at the advent of MacCarthyism in the early 1950s, Moon Gaffney anticipates William Kennedy's portraits of the political world of Irish America in his Albany novels. James Liddy's most recent collection is Gold Set Dancing, published by Salmon in 2000.

Of increasing interest in Irish Studies is the history of ideas in Ireland, a pursuit renewed by a new generation of scholars, of whom many first published in The Crane Bag. The volumes—now numbering five—of The Field DayAnthology (1991; 2002) has spurred on the writing of intellectual history in Ireland. A prime example of such new work is Thomas Duddy's incisive History of Irish Thought (2002). Such efforts give the lie to popular culture's presumption that the concept of Irish ideas is an oxymoron. Writing here, Prof. Duddy discerns in Revival writing the limitations of "writing for Ireland" and arrives at a reconsideration of William Larminie's 1897 views on Eriugena, whose De divisione naturae he translated. Those are exemplary insofar as Larminie bases them not the idea of an Irish mind—on the presumptions of Celtic essentialism—but on a reappraisal of Eriugena's mind thinking amid the present contingencies of Ireland in Eriugena's time. As Prof. Duddy elegantly reveals, to be an Irish thinker in Ireland is to engage ideas philosophically, or theologically, rather than in the narrative, poetic, or political modes typical of the Revival.

From Belfast Frank Ormsby has sent on a sheaf of new poems whose humor and wonder our readers will admire. In 2002 Ormsby received the Lawrence M. O'Shaughnessy Award for Poetry in recognition of his constant artistry and and steadying contribution to Northern poetry, a term that, as Gerald Dawe notes in this issue, Ormsby helped define. The highly crafted, slowly construed verbal and emotional subtleties of Ormsby's lines reveal much that remains valuable in Northern life and culture. Commended in Ireland and the United Kingdom, Ormsby's collections—A Store of Candles (1977), A Northern Spring (1986), The Ghost Train (1995)—span the most troubled decades of the "Troubles," including the distraught years of the 1980-81 Hunger Strikes. Editor of The Honest Ulsterman (1969-1989), Ormsby is well known for several Blackstaff anthologies, including Poets from the North of Ireland (1979), A Rage for Order: Poetry of the Northern Ireland Troubles (1992), and, most recently, The Hip Flask (2000).

As nationalisms become unfashionable, so artistic expressions of nationalism have become the prime objects of postcolonial theorizing. In Ireland, however, renewed critical attention to the painting of such nationalist realists as Séan Keating, Maurice MacGonigal, Charles Lamb, and Paul Henry. Indeed, Henry has just been honored by a scholarly, retrospective exhibition (February-May, 2003) at the National Gallery of Ireland. Here, Elizabeth Martin synthesizes the work of feminist criticism with the new research of such historians of Irish art as Síghle Breathneach-Lynch and S. B. Kennedy. She does so in order to point out that these painters were aesthetically drawn to the imagery of the Gaelic West in a cultural context fraught with the ideological ramifications of Free State nationalism and the de Valéran dispensation. While their painting did not create de Valéra's Constitution of...