Nótaí na nEagarthóirí: Editors’ Notes

An immigrant’s life is, in a way, defined by the act of leaving. After more than four decades abroad, Dr. Kieran Quinlan scarcely thinks of himself as an immigrant anymore—but as he recounts his recent trip “home” to County Limerick for his uncle’s funeral, the journey inevitably becomes a time for thinking of departures. He speaks of his hurried departure from Alabama; the passing-away of his uncle and the way of life he represented; his own decision to leave monastic life, in 1973; and after the funeral, his return to the United States. Amid all these transitions and relocations, Quinlan recognizes an odd sort of comfort: as he heads to the airport, he intuits a healing continuity in the web of lives lived elsewhere. A specialist in both Irish and Southern literature, Kieran Quinlan’s books include Strange Kin: Ireland and the American South (2005).

In 1853, the Irish International Exhibition held on the grounds of the Royal Dublin Society declared that Irish history was beginning anew as it set out to showcase Irish manufactures, crafts, and industry—and in the process, Dr. Elizabeth Meloy observes, also sought to show Irish resilience in the aftermath of the Famine. Unusually, for events such as this, the Dublin event tipped its hat to the past by exhibiting Irish antiquities—but these artifacts were presented as evidence of a past that was now being overwrittten by a bold prosperity to come. With at-times appalling blitheness, the Exhibition planners and the attendant press coverage made no direct reference to the horrors of the Famine; yet their boosterism conveyed a message that the recent catastrophe had, providentially, paved the way for a new era. “The heightened desire for modernity that pervaded middle-class Dublin in the early 1850s,” Meloy writes, “was nothing other than a reaction to the Famine.” Elizabeth Meloy’s earlier publications on the era of the Famine include a 2009 article on ruined homes in New Hibernia Review.

Many of Elizabeth Cullinan’s literary fictions involve young, single women with professional aspirations—quite a few of whom have lived abroad for a time. Such characters fill Cullinan’s short stories collected in The Time of Adam (1971) and Yellow Roses (1977); another serves as the protagonist of her 1982 novel A Change of Scene. Dr. Beth O’Leary Anish zeroes in on this “meta-character,” and explicates the many ways in which these young women might be located in Irish American social history. All must negotiate with such family baggage as strained parental marriages, irresponsible fathers, and mothers preoccupied with appearances and with acquiring middle-class security. And when abroad, and to some extent at home, Cullinan’s young women must also reckon with the duality of insider versus outsider. They resolve these tensions by pursuing a path unavailable to their mothers, that of becoming confident career women. Beth O’Leary Anish is a frequent presenter on Irish diasporic writing at ACIS and other conferences.

Persona poems are one of Catherine Ann Cullen’s specialties, a talent on full display in this issue’s Filíocht Nua–New Poetry section. Her “Swift Song,” in the voice of Gulliver, declares “I am all about perspective.” Perhaps that phrase provides the key to apprehending the suite “Seven Works of Mercy,” which arose after a hurried visit to view Carravagio’s masterpiece in Naples. These poems look at human nature from various social perspectives, each offering a different vision; all are true in a way, but the entire truth is that the act of creation—of speaking out of experience—is what saves us, offering a way to express our own and our shared humanity, speckled as it is with both good and bad impulses. This is vivid in the sonnet “Samson,” which ends, “I dip my bone in blood, paint only slaughter, / find mercy in a clenched fist squeezing water.” Catherine Ann Cullen’s new and selected collection The Other Now appeared from Dedalus Press in 2016.

Sebastian Barry’s multi-novel project of writing his family’s loyalist history back into the Irish national story took an unexpected...