NEW HIBERNIA REVIEW
Earrach/Spring 2002

aífe murray A Yankee Poet's Irish Headwaters michael patrick gillespie The Myth of Hidden Ireland: The Corrosive Effect of Place in The Quiet Man chris agee Filíocht Nua: New Poetry constance b. rynder The Origins and Early Years of the Northern Ireland Women's Coalition frank a. biletz Women and Irish-Ireland: The Domestic Nationalism of Mary Butler richard rankin russell Brendan Behan's Lament for Gaelic Ireland: The Quare Fellow sarah broom Learning about Dying: Mutability and the Classics in the Poetry of Michael Longley patrick maume Monaghan Reimagined: The Orangeman (1915) as Ulster-American Origin Narrative lben howard Mysterious Crafts: The Figure of Printing in the Poems of Greg Delanty Exhibitions: Taispeántais john hayden Funding for Research in Institutions of Higher Learning in Ireland Léirmheasanna: Reviews

Clúdach: Cover Made infamous for rainy dreariness in Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, the city of Limerick has transformed itself over the past two decades into a vibrant university town. Amid its refurbished Georgian streets and Shannon-side walks may be found notable museums and galleries: the Limerick City Museum, the Hunt Museum, and the Limerick City Gallery of Art on Pery Square. The covers of this sixth volume of New Hibernia Review will celebrate the city of Limerick by presenting artifacts and works from the city's museums. Our first issue for 2002 presents Jack Donovan's large and vivid painting Poet Ryan, which has hung high on the wall of the Limerick City Museum's main gallery since 1974. Measuring 122 x 91.5 cms, Donovan's portrait depicts a legendary Limerick figure—the “People's Poet” Michael D. Ryan, of Askeaton, who was known for his verses celebrating sports, music, and local history. Painting in oil on board, Donovan has seated the People's Poet where he was wont to sit, in the corner seat of a pub with whiskey before him. The viewer cannot recognize this as The Sarsfield or any other pub, for Donovan has turned the setting into an abstraction emphasized by the plane of the table before Ryan. Even Ryan's seated figure is generic. The setting provides a frame for a bravura act of painting. Donovan has delineated in detail and bright tones the poet's head—the sacred Celtic head. Donovan catches Ryan's glance—a forward glance that questions the viewer's willingness to hear Ryan say a poem. Himself born in Limerick in 1934, Jack Donovan has exhibited throughout Ireland and, until lately, taught at the Limerick School of Art and Design. The Limerick City Gallery of Art houses a rich permanent collection of Irish art and regularly gives over its new galleries to exhibitions of contemporary Irish and European art. The gallery occupies the Carnegie Building, which was constructed of stone in 1903 in neo-Romanesque style at the edge of the People's Park. In 1998, this building was renovated and expanded. We thank the Limerick City Gallery of Art and its director, Michael Fitzpatrick, for the permission to reproduce Donovan's painting on the cover of this issue of New Hibernia Review.

Cover: Clúdach

Aífe Murray, a poet and artist living in San Francisco, opens this issue by casting her eye across the landscape of South Tipperary, a place of origins for an unpredictable line of literary descent. For the past decade Murray has been immersed in recovering the long-silenced voice of Margaret Maher. An immigrant domestic from the Slievenamon countryside, Maher found her way into the kitchen of Emily Dickinson and, from there, into the poems that are so canonically American. For Murray herself, however, the townlands that Maher left a century and a half ago also become a place of closure and of restored connectedness. Aífe Murray has just completed a book-length study of Maher and Dickinson; her earlier articles on the subject have appeared in Signs and The American Voice.

Not a St. Patrick's Day passes without a revival, often on the airwaves of public television, of John Ford's 1952 classic film The Quiet Man. Conventional readings of the film hold that director Ford—born Seán Aloysius O'Fearna—and a cast of redoubtable Irish and Irish-American actors apotheosized any number of Irish stereotypes in the making of their classic. Michael Patrick Gillespie asks us to resist such reductive analyses, because, as he shows here, the film also offers “a relentless analysis of the complex nature of myth and custom in Ireland.” The holder of Marquette University's Louise Edna Goeden Chair of English, Dr. Gillespie has written or edited ten books, the most recent of which is Reading William Kennedy (2002).

Writing from Belfast, Chris Agee gives us a suite of allusive and challenging poems that employ broken forms and multiple voices to face up to the shattering effects of ethnic conflict—but in “the former Yugoslavia” rather than Northern Ireland. Paired here are two environmental elegies. One, dedicated to the naturalist and journalist Michael Viney, surveys the landscape of Donegal; the other, surveys the killing ground around Pristina. For Agee, the millennium begins in threnody. Currently at work on a prose memoir titled “Journey to Bosnia,” Agee edited the Bloodaxe anthology Scar on the Stone: Contemporary Poetry from Bosnia (1995). Chris Agee's prior collections are The New Hampshire Woods, from Dedalus Press, and the chapbook The Sierra de Zacatecas, from Editions Papeles Privados (1995). Chris Agee's forthcoming collection is titled First Light.

To the casual observer, the politics of Northern Ireland presents a bewildering alphabet soup of political parties and organizations, all exclusively male until very recent times. A new and—to entrenched politcians in the North—unexpectedly potent entity since 1996 has been the Northern Ireland Women's Coalition or NIWC. Herself a one-time election volunteer for the NIWC, Dr. Constance Rynder recounts here the coming together in the 1990s of a cross-communal women's political agenda that has challenged the province's historic divides and succeeded in electing Monica McWilliams and Jane Morrice to the first Legislative Assembly on Northern Ireland. Professor Rynder's publications on women's history include articles on the ballerina Maria Tallchief and the Mohawk clan mother Molly Brant. More recently, Dr. Rynder's essay on the Seneca Falls convention of 1848 appeared in American History.

Even when abstracted from the political and cultural contents of its original performance, Brendan Behan's 1956 masterpiece The Quare Fellow remains a powerful drama of prison life and a telling indictment of capital punishment. Yet, as Richard Rankin Russell notes, even some of the most astute critics of Irish drama have not realized that Behan's is also “a protest against the continuing Anglicization of Ireland.” Starting from the little-noted detail that the title character's first language is Irish—most probably the Kerry Irish of the Blasket Islands—Dr. Russell argues that Behan's play may best be understood as an “anticolonial” drama rather than a postcolonial one because of the presence in it of linering colonial elements that the play critiques. Behan's The Quare Fellow is heir to the radical separatism implied in Douglas Hyde's seminal lecture of 1892. Professor Russell has lately published articles on Peter Fallon, Eavan Boland, and on Seamus O'Kelly's “The Weaver's Grave,” and he has contributed to the 2001 volume Yeats and Postcolonialism from Locust Hill Press.

Writing with elegance and ethical passion since 1969, when No Continuing City appeared, Michael Longley has responded to life in Northern Ireland and, later, in County Mayo, with poetic tact and insightful craft. Longley's readers have often remarked upon his eloquent use of Homer and Ovid. Here, writing from New Zealand, Dr. Sarah Broom reads Longley's poetry—especially Gorse Fires (1991)—in respect to Longley's Greek and Latin allusions. Broom reveals that Longley's recourse to his classical learning helps him frame elegies to his mother with whom, as his Tupenny Stung (1994) reveals, Longley had a difficult relationship. Likewise, Longley's reliance on the ethical strengths offered by Homer helps him frame his responses to the difficulties created by the continuing “Troubles” in the North. Dr. Broom's discussion closes by examining Longley's difficult sonnet “Ceasefire.”

The last issue of New Hibernia Review (5: 4) posed Castle Rackrent as a type of slave narrative, on the American model. Edgeworth's novel is easy to find in the library, but John H. Finlay's 1915 novel The Orangeman is not. Ever alert to an interesting text, Dr. Patrick Maume reads this naive American fiction through to its portrayal from the Protestant side of sectarian strife in County Monaghan from the time of Catholic Emancipation to the Famine. In The Orangeman, Finlay heroizes his grandfather—thinly disguised as “Yalnif”—who led the Finlays from disturbed Ulster to the promised land of Protestant America. Working from an exiled imagination, Finlay depicts Ribbonism negatively, reconstructs Ulster speech, and records stereotypes of the rural Catholic Irish that persisted through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. Dr. Maume is the author of “Life that is Exile”: Daniel Corkery and the Search for Irish Ireland (1996) and The Long Gestation: Irish Nationalist Life 1891–1918 (1999).

Mary E. L. Butler, Máire de Buitléir (1872–1920), is remember today chiefly because some sources identify her as having coined the potent phrase “Sinn Féin” in 1904 to sum up a philosophy of cultural nationalism. As a woman of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, Butler clung to the “separate spheres” approach to gender roles that characterized her social milieu. As Frank Biletz reveals here, Butler was also a pamphleteer, journalist, and advocate for the Irish language who asserted a central place for women in advancing the Irish-Ireland agenda: “public affairs,” she wrote in 1899, “have plenty of people looking after them, but private affairs are being neglected and women must step into the breach....” Professor Biletz is currently researching the varying boundaries of cultural identities in Britain and Ireland. Dr. Biletz's publications include a study of the Irish-Ireland movement and the Catholic bishops in Piety and Power in Ireland: Essays in Honour of Emmet Larkin (1999).

A selection of poems from Greg Delanty's 1998 book The Hellbox appeared in the pages of this journal (Autumn, 1998), and we hope that enticing sample led many readers to pick up the Cork poet's much-honored collection. In such terms as “dingbat,” “ligature,” mind your Ps and Qs,” and in anecdote, the language and lore of the printing house permeate The Hellbox. In this essay Professor Ben Howard looks closely at how this inventive printing imagery becomes the poet's “gathering metaphor.” Poet, essayist, and classical guitarist, Ben Howard is the author of four collections of poetry, including the verse novella Midcentury (1997), and The Pressed Melodeon: Essays on Modern Irish Writing (1996). Dark Pool, Howard's most recent collection of poems, is forthcoming from Salmon Press.

This issue's “Exhibitions” article by John Hayden stretches the sense of the rubric, yet it does assume that Ireland's research institutions and enterprises show off to the world the qualities of the trained Irish mind at work. First presented as a lecture at the 2001 Merriman Summer School, Hayden's article on the funding of research, and not just scientific research, in Ireland stresses two points. In the decades before the 1970s, research was carried out not so much in the universities of Ireland as in such pubic research organizations as An Foras Talúntais or the Agricultural Institute. Since the expansion of third-level education and the incorporation of national institutes of higher education into such new universities as the University of Limerick or Dublin City University, research has moved increasingly into the universities. That move has been encouraged by such enterprises as the National Microelectronics Centre at University College Cork. Consequently, the funding for research has been channeled into education, and research has come to be seen as a necessary adjunct to excellent university teaching. Moreover, at the close of the decade of the Celtic Tiger, funding for research has increased substantially to over one billion punt. John L. Hayden is the secretary and chief executive of An tÚdarás um Ard-Oideachas (The Higher Education Authority).

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