NEW HIBERNIA REVIEW
Fomhar/Autumn 1999

James E. Doan
How the Irish and Scots Became Indians:
Colonial Traders and Agents and the Southeastern Tribes
Brian John
Derek Mahon’s Letters from America
Aidan Rooney-Céspedes
Filíocht Nua: New Poetry
Jeffrey H. Richards
Brogue Irish Take the American Stage, 1767–1808
Susan Shaw Sailer
The North and the Republic: Nation, State, and Ethnicity
Donna Potts
From Tír na nÓg to Tír na Muck:
Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy
Wayne E. Hall
Landscape as Frame in The Real Charlotte
Noelle Bowles
Nationalism and Feminism in Lady Gregory’s
Kincora, Dervorgilla, and Grania
Lillis ó Laoire
Traditional Music: Ceol Traidisiúnta
Údair Úra / New Authorities: Cultural Process
and Meaning in a Gaelic Folk Song
Léirmheasanna: Reviews
Cover: Clúdach
Nuacht faoi Údair: News of Authors

 

Editors’ Notes: Nótaí na nEagarthóirí
James Doan—who in the inaugural issue of New Hibernia Review surveyed the ways in which the colonizers of early modern England melded the Irish and the Native Americans in their imaginations—returns to our pages here with a consideration of intermarriage between the Indian tribes of the American southeast and the Celtic traders who lived among them. Doan offers a tantalizing first look at their complex patterns of relationship and descent, and finds that the Irish and Scots of the eighteenth century were unabashedly exogamous—and also that their descendants lived comfortably and proudly with their multiracial ancestry. Professor Doan, of Florida's Nova Southeastern University, is the editor of the "Working Papers in Irish Studies" series and the author of numerous books, articles, and papers in Irish and Celtic Studies.

Colonial settlers looked to the indigenous peoples to guide them through a baffling New World; readers of contemporary poetry often turn to critics for the same illumination. Here, Brian John charts a path through Derek Mahon's The Hudson Letter (1995), a rich collection in which the Belfast-born poet makes extensive use the verse-letter form. Though not all of Mahon's verse letters hit their mark, the epistolary verses of the title poem may nonetheless be counted among Mahon's finest work. These letters, which follow the poet through the course of a day in New York City, rest on a rich underpinning of allusion, intertextuality, and the invocation of literary forbears, which Brian John brings to light here. A past president of the Canadian Association for Irish Studies, Brian John's most recent book is Reading the Ground: The Poetry of Thomas Kinsella (1996).

Now living and teaching near Boston, Aidan Rooney-Céspedes was born in the border county of Monaghan in 1965. In one way or another, each of the nine poems presented here explores another sort of borderland, that between the present and past. The objects and memories that fill his poems come freighted with deepening associations; they range from memories of first jobs and a vanished pet, to an imagined encounter with an early Irish photographer, and conclude here, in "Safe Haven," with a meditation on the lost histories of detritus found under suburban lawns. Aidan Rooney-Céspedes has published widely in journals in Europe and North America, including Poetry Ireland Review, College English, and The Antigonish Review. A first collection of his poems, titled Day Release, is forthcoming from Gallery Press in 2000.

Even as the realities of Irish-American identity were growing more complex, the playwrights of the early American stage continued to traffic in the broadest of ethnic stereotypes to leaven their productions with comic relief. Jeffrey Richards pays close attention to the "brogue" characters found in two such plays, Judith Sargent Murray's The Traveller Returned (1796) and James Nelson Barker's The Indian Princess (1808). In these and other plays of the era, Richards finds a more serious purpose behind the superficially comic inclusion of Irish types: the bumbling Paddys were also meant to reassure audiences that the Irish would prove, after all, inconsistent with "the great themes of national independence, Anglo-American cultural hegemony, and the course of empire." Professor Richards's books include the 1991 Theater Enough: American Culture and the Metaphor of the World Stage, 1607-1789.

Perhaps the progenitor of all Stage Irishmen was Shakespeare's MacMorrow, who asked, in Henry V, "What ish my nation?" Here, Susan Shaw Sailer reminds us that the same question has been asked most solemnly—and, in the North, quite literally as a matter of life and death—throughout this century. What is a nation? What is a state? And how do such abstractions connect to ethnicity? After exploring the disjunct relations of nation, state, and ethnicity in Northern Ireland, Professor Sailer finds hope for a new "civic nationalism" advocated by Michael Ignatieff and others in our understanding that these ideological constructions are always "plural and in-process, neither fixed nor static." Susan Shaw Sailer is the editor of Representing Ireland: Gender, Class, Nationality (1997) and is currently working on a book on recent Irish poetry.

Clashing conceptions of Ireland also shape Patrick McCabe's terrifying novel The Butcher Boy (1992), a book that tracks the violent fantasies of twelve-year-old Francie McCabe. For instance, the long-standing association of the Irish with pigs, enshrined in the racist cartoons of Punch a century earlier, remains current in this young boy's world. As Donna Potts shows here, these and the other conflicting images that come to young Francie through popular culture—comic books, songs, and, especially, television—spur his psychic disintegration in the Ireland of October, 1962, as the Cuban missile crisis looms over the world. Professor Potts has also recently concluded a study of Angela's Ashes and popular culture.

Although a number of recent writers have praised The Real Charlotte— a book which some have called the finest Irish novel of its century—Somerville and Ross's 1890 novel remains, for too many readers, an undiscovered jewel. Wayne Hall draws our attention here to one of the novel's many virtues of craft, its almost painterly concern with landscape. In the hands of Somerville and Ross, the landscape becomes the frame in which the story takes place, and the frame, in turn, becomes an evocation of both the restraints and limitations imposed on colonial Ireland and of the contests to occupy the space within. Professor Hall, who has lately completed a critical history of the Dublin University Magazine, is the author of Shadowy Heroes: Irish Literature of the 1890s (1980).

Isabella Augusta Persse Gregory (1852-1932) wrote in an era when, as Noelle Bowles notes, " a woman who wished to work for nationalist causes had to couch both her patriotic impulses and her rebellion against Victorian gender constraints very carefully." Just such rebellions percolate below the surface of three of Lady Gregory's plays, Kincora (1905), Devorgilla (1907), and Grania (1912), which Bowles examines here through the lens of feminist theory. Gregory's new interpretations of nationalist myths for the stage also offered examples of women who sought to direct their own destinies—women who would not be objectified or spoken for by patriarchy. Professor Bowles provided essays on Lady Gregory and AE for Modern Irish Writers: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook (1997), and is currently researching the unpublished letters of Lady Gregory.

Modern recording technology and the mass market for traditional music have broadcast the folk songs of Ireland quite literally around the world. What is far more difficult to convey, when such songs are abstracted from the context of performance and the rich associations of history and communal memory, is their quality of "authority"—in Irish, údar. Here, Lillis Ó Laoire probes the many levels of meaning and authority found in the Gaelic song "A Phaidí a Ghrá" collected on Tory Island, and finds that the song speaks not only to the specific and local (an incident in the Dixon family), but also to the universal and moral. Professor Ó Laoire conducts his research in folklore and ethnomusicology from the Department of Language and Cultural Studies at the University of Limerick.

Clúdach: Cover
The cover of this third issue of New Hibernia Review's 1999 volume presents another twentieth-century painting from the McGrath Bequest to the Crawford Municipal Gallery, a collection of forty-five works by Irish artists collected over the past three decades by Fr. John McGrath of Tipperary and Limerick. This issue's cover features Knockalough (1977) by Brian Bourke. Born in Dublin in 1936, Bourke studied at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, and later moved to London to further his studies. Bourke, who has worked in Bavaria, Switzerland, France, has represented Ireland abroad on many occasions including the Paris Biennale in 1965 and the Lugano exhibition in London in 1980. He now lives and works in the West of Ireland and is a member of Aosdána. In 1988, a retrospective exhibition of Bourke's work was mounted at the Galway Arts Festival and was later shown at the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham in Dublin.

Temperament, subjectivity, and emotion are all qualities associated with an appreciation of Brian Bourke's landscape and his stark paintings of figures in interiors. His paintings frequently make use of circular and oval devices to contain our vision within the heart of his compositions. In Knockalough (oil on canvas, 161 cm x 161 cm), the familiar circular shape assumes the appearance of a vertical screen through which the receding landscape is viewed. At the same time, this circular form appears to refer to our larger world of which this landscape detail is but a small part. The somber earth tones and the expressive interpretation of this rugged landscape effectively capture the harshness of those tracts of bog and heathland that we associate with Ireland's western shores. Bourke's landscape here is dominated by an ominous and threatening cloud form which evokes the power and changing force of nature. In its shape and implied movement across the landscape, this ambiguous form makes a distinct figurative reference—perhaps to a deity—thus serving to remind us of the power that ultimately controls and directs nature's changing panorama. We thank Director Peter Murray and the staff of the Crawford for this opportunity to present paintings from the McGrath Bequest.
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