Nótaí na nEagarthóirí: Editor’s Notes

The blank page can feel like a blank stare and be just as threatening coming from either a position of authority or a look into an unknown future. Over the past year, there has been much staring. I have corresponded with friends, fellow editors, and writers, and the same seems to be true: periods of productivity interspersed with almost equal periods of paralysis. We are all of us hearing talking heads natter on about “unprecedented times,” as if they have just discovered the first polysyllabic word that they can use in a sentence read from a teleprompter.

Like a blank page, though, every day and every individual human action is unprecedented. I was reminded of this while in isolation months ago with my partner, whom I greeted one morning with “welcome to another unprecedented day.” There was probably an October 10, 2019—though we may be hardly able to recall it—so there is a precedent for that month and day, but all of the actions are determined by us. We make our days.

The late David Foster Wallace was fond of talking about our “hard-wiring.” He would argue that because of the very nature of our means of perception, our brains, and our survival instinct we are biologically made to see ourselves as the center of our universe. Everything that we see, hear, touch, or smell is seen, heard, touched, or smelled by us personally. Ultimately, every day is spent in “isolation.” The challenge is constant: to see the constellations of our universe that are other people. This connection ends the quarantine of the self. As we continue to look into the blank stare of an unknown future, we must constantly remind ourselves of this challenge. Written a number of months ago, Angela Griffith’s wonderful cover notes for this issue are worth considering in this light.

Over the past many months, we have been grateful for, encouraged by, and at times frankly amazed at the work that has been shared with New Hibernia Review. As the journal of record in Irish Studies, we are proud that we do not exclusively publish academics. That said, many in academia have been learning all sorts of “new tricks”—Zoom conferences, so-called hybrid classes, and any number of means to continue keeping students enrolled and educated. Many of us who are writers have also attended “virtual book launches” and “Zoom readings” and stared at a small screen when we longed to be with our friends and meet others and talk without our names being lit up at the sound of our own voices.

The thought of the lunacy of “unprecedented” hit home during the first class of the fall term as I looked out over a lecture hall of students wearing masks. I apologized to them for the strangeness of the circumstances as I stood before them in a mask and what looked like a welder’s hat. It was at that point that one of those rare students in the first ten rows raised her hand and said, “I’ve never taken this course before so I guess everything seems okay.” As in Leontia Flynn’s elegy for Seamus Heaney, quoted by Joseph Heininger in this issue, we might try to be as “deliberate and unafraid” as that woman and guess that everything might be okay, if not soon, eventually.

Within the works selected over the past many months that comprise this issue, there is a surprising link. Aside from the occasion for the wonderful translation from the University College Cork “Creative Corona” project, none of the works directly address the current global health crisis. Yet a string does seem to emerge: the construction of the past, our books or songs for isolation, negotiating nightmare and trauma, and the nuances of elegy. Thomas Kinsella was kind enough to share a new, and dark, poem, for which we are very grateful. Regarding the work in this issue, we are sad but pleased to publish Daniel Tobin’s important exploration of tradition and history in the poetry of Derek Mahon. The article was submitted before Mahon’s recent passing. This...