Nótaí na nEagarthóirí: Editors' Notes

In the wake of so many commercially successful stories of unhappy childhoods, the suspicion lurks that the contemporary memoir has come to treat misery as the default starting point. How sad that would be, if so, for memoir is also the genre best suited to disclose the joy of discovering the world. Against the zeitgeist of cherished injury, the poet and scholar Timothy Brownlow here recounts—with affection and crystalline recall of the landscape of his childhood in the seaside village of Howth—his "Rambles with Leo," the local postman. For the young Brownlow, already alert to the deep pleasures of literature, those rambles quite literally opened the doors of a world close to home—a world of eccentricity, colorful speech, and irresistible gossip. Long resident in Canada, Timothy Brownlow is the author of John Clare and the Picturesque Landscape (1983), as well as three volumes of poetry and the 2008 essay collection Hiding Places.

Turmoil was a political and social fact of life in nineteenth-century Ireland, and Dr. Cara Delay reminds us that conflict pervaded religious life in rural Ireland as well—a topic she has examined in articles in Éire-Ireland and U.S. Catholic Historian, and the subject of her current book project. The sweeping reforms in Catholic practice begun under the leadership of Cardinal Paul Cullen sought a more centralized and regularized church; but, as Delay notes, those reforms were by no means accepted with docility in every instance. Multiple sources, ranging from folklore to episcopal diaries to official church correspondence, make clear that heated lay-clerical disputes were common. These include cases of priests being locked out of their churches, the systematic withholding of contributions by parishioners, and physical assaults on priests. Even the most zealous reformers, Delay suggests, learned to walk carefully when faced with the power of the local.

The occasions of the five new poems from Patrick Deeley in this issue's "Filíocht Nua" section vary widely; he gives us poems spurred by such familiar sights as honeybees and a flock of crows, as well as ekphrastic poems that respond to a strangely deteriorating clay statue and an eerie sculpture found in a Swiss monastery. Yet, each of these diverse poems brings us back to Deeley's preoccupations with the irresistible power of the earth itself, the woundedness of the physical world, and the edge of mystery sensed in nature and in objects—as when, listening to the gabbling of birds, "crow conversations become the earth speaking in riddles / that stay unfathomed no matter how intently I listen." A native of East Galway now living in suburban Dublin, the most recent of Patrick Deeley's four collections are Turane: The Hidden Village (2005) and The Bones of Creation (2008).

Ever the modernist, Samuel Beckett displayed a lifelong distrust of any too-restrictive categorizations of identity, including those couched in reductive terms of nationality, religion, and language. Prescriptive ideas—such as those of D. P. Moran and the Irish-Ireland movement that sought to expunge foreign influences—were entirely too well known to Beckett while a student at Trinity. Here, Dr. Alexander McKee teases out the implications of Beckett's decision to give the name "Moran" to one of the central characters in his novel in French, Molloy (1951). Though scarcely a literal stand-in for the real-world Moran, Beckett's fictional character is equally uncompromising and censorious; the more sympathetic character of Molloy, who comes to reject any too-rigid definition of identity, is surely nearer to Beckett's thinking. Beckett may have tried to disguise the local settings of his novel, McKee observes, but its link to the mindset of the early Free State is clear. Alexander McKee's work has appeared in Literature/Film Quarterly and in the Facts on File Companion to World Poetry (2008).

No observer of Irish life in recent months could fail to be struck by the furor and the passion that has followed the release of government-sponsored inquiries into accusations of physical and sexual abuses in institutions operated by the Roman Catholic church. In this issue, the periodic "Ceisteanna Úra-Fresh...