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New Hibernia Review 7.1 (2003) 153-155



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Last Before America: Irish and American Writing. Edited by Fran Brearton and Eamonn Hughes, pp. 232. Belfast: Blackstaff Press; Chester Springs, PA: Dufour Editions, 2002. $ 24.95.

This volume of literary essays, poems, and reminiscences is a festschrift in honor of Michael Allen, who, until his recent retirement, taught American Literature at Queen's University, Belfast, and who left a profound impression on colleagues and students, as well as produced an important body of critical work. In addition to his work as a scholar and teacher, Allen was a member of the original Belfast "Group"in the 1960s. He encountered the earliest work of Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, and Derek Mahon and then, later on, taught Paul Muldoon, Medbh McGuckian, and Ciaran Carson. Each of this sextet now contributes original work in his honor. An equally strong group of scholars, including Peter McDonald, Nicholas Roe, Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, and Edna Longley, is also represented. Given the nature of such an undertaking, Last Before America is eclectic without being incoherent in any way, with each contributor, however obliquely, referencing some aspect of Allen's critical, moral, and cultural fields. Its editors have gathered together a collection of poems and essays that are uniformly strong and challenging at every turn.

A majority of the essayists explores the work of the poets associated with Queen's throughout the course of Allen's career and two in particular deserve particular attention. In "Faiths and Fidelities: Heaney and Longley in Mid-Career," Peter McDonald argues that too much critical attention has been afforded to Heaney's work while not enough attention has been paid to Longley's, and this has allowed Longley to develop his work in comparative privacy, something which Heaney has been unable to do, and which, has to a minor degree, has undermined Heaney's work in McDonald's opinion. Much of this critical adulation, according to McDonald, continuing a train of thought developed in Mistaken Identities, his monograph on the poetry of Northern Ireland, has "come from American academe." In contrast, the best readings of these poets' works have emerged from the North of Ireland where the emphasis is on mediation rather than on adulation. McDonald believes that a great strength shared by both poets is the measure of resistance they consistently offer to those who wish to place them within the bounds of facile literary, theoretical and political narratives. Of course, one might well argue that both poets, given the nature of their chosen art, might just as easily resist critical perspectives brewed at home in the North of Ireland.

Adrienne Janus in "Mnemosyne and the Mislaid" provides a detailed formalist reading of Heaney, Longley, and McGuckian. However, what is most impressive and moving about her paper is her articulation of the differing agendas [End Page 153] and personae employed by critics and writers. For critics, according to Janus, poetry and poetic memory are inseparable from "written history or cultural history," whereas poets themselves treat poetry and the poetics of memory as "rituals of performance and habit." From this point onward, using the work of Plato, Hegel, Freud, and others, she strives to understand better the divide that exists between the two while, at the same time, showing how memory theory impacts the minutiae of various poems. In this essay, Janus, with great dexterity, is able to bring various critical approaches to reading poetry, which we might often consider opposed to one another, into an exciting dialogue.

Of course, all of these essays are sharing the space of the volume with the work of living poets and, in this respect, Janus's essay is a bridge that leads the voices from one side of the divide to the other. "Ulster Protestants and the Question of 'Culture,'" Edna Longley's contribution, is an exploration of issues of literature, politics, and misrepresentation and is so packed with ideas, insights, and verve that it will leave the reader begging for more. Her starting point is late 1999 at the moment when she learns that the Ulster...

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