NEW HIBERNIA REVIEW
Earrach/Spring 2003

james liddy Croesus and Dorothy Day: Moon Gaffney's Irish America lthomas duddy Thinking Ireland: Cultural Nationalism and the Problem of Irish Ideas lfrank ormsby Filíocht Nua: New Poetry lelizabeth frances martin Painting the Irish West: Nationalism and the Representation of Women john cronin Liam O'Flaherty and Dúil jerrold casway Heroines or Victims? The Women of the Flight of the Earls gerald dawe History Class: Northern Poetry, 1970–82 michael parker Northern Odyssey: John Montague's “The Cry” (1964) in Its Political Contexts donna decker schuster The Heritage of Elegy in The Crying Game (1993) patrick o'sullivan Developing Irish Diaspora Studies: A Personal View Reviews: Léirmheasanna Clúdach: Cover News of Authors: Nuacht faoi Údair

Clúdach: Cover The art on the covers of our seventh volume of New Hibernia Review comes from Dublin's Irish Museum of Modern Art: Áras Nua-Ealaíne na hÉireann, Royal Hospital, Kilmainham. The museum's rich collections hold works by such well-known Irish artists as Paul Henry, William Conor, and Louis le Brocquy, but works by such contemporary artists as Kathy Prendergast (b. 1958) are the focus of the museum's exhibitions. Currently living in London and represented by the Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, Prendergast first exhibited her work in New York in 1985. The End and the Beginning: City Drawings was her first solo museum exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (December, 1999– March, 2000). Prendergast's sculpture is witty, conceptual, countercultural; her drawing is detailed, cartographic, engaged with landscape both urban and rural. The work on this issue's cover is Stack (1989–91), measuring 270 x 260 x 70 cm. In assembling Stack, Prendergast has “drawn” a section of landscape with the materials of labor and built up iridescent blues and greens of colored cloth and string, paint and wood. Stack also appeared in IMMA's exhibition Irish Art Now: From the Poetic to the Political (November, 2001–March, 2002), curated by Declan McGonagle, the founding director of the museum. In the context of that show, Stack becomes a three-dimensional exercise in gorgeous social commentary making ordinary work—stacking wood and felt and denim—monumental. Viewed from all sides in the context of Prendergast's conceptual sculpture employing such ordinary crafts as knitting, as in Prayer Gloves (1998) or Secret Kiss (1999), Stack becomes a surrealist restatement of the watery surfaces of Irish landscape. We thank the director and board of the Irish Museum of Modern art, Dublin's Kerlin Gallery, and especially Catherine Marshall and Riann Coulter of the Irish Museum of Modern for helping us bring this example of contemporary Irish art to our readers.

Editors’ Notes: Nótaí na nEagarthóirí
Poet, raconteur, émigré academic, James Liddy was in at the start of Irish Studies in the United States in the 1960s. Educated to the Dublin bar, Liddy followed his mother's heritage back to the United States, but not into the high American Irish society of the East Coast that Harry Sylvester lightly fictionalizes in the romance of Moon Gaffney. Not only does Dorothy Day appear in Sylvester's pages, but also Liddy's own uncles and cousins. Here, Liddy points up the many ways in which Sylvester's 1947 novel offers readers of satire and social history an image of Irish America that counters those working –class fictions rendered by such writers as James Farrell or Maureen Howard. Indeed, in its veiled focus on diocesan and Tammany politics at the advent of MacCarthyism in the early 1950s, Moon Gaffney anticipates William Kennedy's portraits of the political world of Irish America in his Albany novels. James Liddy's most recent collection is Gold Set Dancing, published by Salmon in 2000.

Of increasing interest in Irish Studies is the history of ideas in Ireland, a pursuit renewed by a new generation of scholars, of whom many first published in The Crane Bag. The volumes—now numbering five—of The Field Day Anthology (1991; 2002) has spurred on the writing of intellectual history in Ireland. A prime example of such new work is Thomas Duddy's incisive History of Irish Thought (2002). Such efforts give the lie to popular culture's presumption that the concept of Irish ideas is an oxymoron. Writing here, Prof. Duddy discerns in Revival writing the limitations of “writing for Ireland” and arrives at a reconsideration of William Larminie's 1897 views on Eriugena, whose De divisione naturae he translated. Those are exemplary insofar as Larminie bases them not the idea of an Irish mind—on the presumptions of Celtic essentialism—but on a reappraisal of Eriugena's mind thinking amid the present contingencies of Ireland in Eriugena's time. As Prof. Duddy elegantly reveals, to be an Irish thinker in Ireland is to engage ideas philosophically, or theologically, rather than in the narrative, poetic, or political modes typical of the Revival.

From Belfast Frank Ormsby has sent on a sheaf of new poems whose humor and wonder our readers will admire. In 2002 Ormsby received the Lawrence M. O'Shaughnessy Award for Poetry in recognition of his constant artistry and and steadying contribution to Northern poetry, a term that, as Gerald Dawe notes in this issue, Ormsby helped define. The highly crafted, slowly construed verbal and emotional subtleties of Ormsby's lines reveal much that remains valuable in Northern life and culture. Commended in Ireland and the United Kingdom, Ormsby's collections—A Store of Candles (1977), A Northern Spring (1986), The Ghost Train (1995)—span the most troubled decades of the “Troubles,” including the distraught years of the 1980–81 Hunger Strikes. Editor of The Honest Ulsterman (1969–1989), Ormsby is well known for several Blackstaff anthologies, including Poets from the North of Ireland (1979), A Rage for Order: Poetry of the Northern Ireland Troubles (1992), and, most recently, The Hip Flask (2000).

As nationalisms become unfashionable, so artistic expressions of nationalism have become the prime objects of postcolonial theorizing. In Ireland, however, renewed critical attention to the painting of such nationalist realists as Séan Keating, Maurice MacGonigal, Charles Lamb, and Paul Henry. Indeed, Henry has just been honored by a scholarly, retrospective exhibition (February–May, 2003) at the National Gallery of Ireland. Here, Elizabeth Martin synthesizes the work of feminist criticism with the new research of such historians of Irish art as Síghle Breathneach-Lynch and S. B. Kennedy. She does so in order to point out that these painters were aesthetically drawn to the imagery of the Gaelic West in a cultural context fraught with the ideological ramifications of Free State nationalism and the de Valéran dispensation. While their painting did not create de Valéra's Constitution of 1937, it did reflect the conservative constellation of views that informed it—especially those regarding the situation of Irish women in the society that the Treaty of 1921 created in the South. Two of these four Royal Hibernian Academy painters—Henry and Lamb—were Northerners.

Ever since its publication in 1953, Liam O'Flaherty's collection of short stories Dúil (Desire) has been a source of scholarly interest and critical debate owing to the liminal nature of the stories themselves and the liminal history of their compositon. They fall square on the border between Irish and English. In writing and publishing them in Irish and English in several versions and several orders, O'Flaherty stood astride the linguistic and, thus, ideological boundary. Indeed, he wrote “I am a whore when I write in English.” Scholars like de Bhaldraithe, Daniels, and Denvir have parsed the stories' textual histories and qualities in both languages. Here, John Cronin sorts out the ideological issues, linguistic conundra, and aesthetic origins of O'Flaherty's stories. In so doing, he offers a reading of “Teangabháil” (“[The] Touch”) that turns it into a parable about language choice and choice language. Prof. Cronin retired recently from Queen's University, Belfast.

Historians point to the Flight of the Earls in 1607 as the event that precipitated the long decline of the Gaelic Order in seventeenth-century Ireland and ended in the Flight of the Wild Geese after the Treaty of Limerick in 1691. Most often historians trace the lives of the Gaelic nobles in Spain, France, Italy, and the Low Countries with averting to their mothers, wives, and daughters. Here, Dr. Jerrold Casway traces out the peregrinations and perils of the noble and serving women of the Flight of the Earls, paying especial attention to the travails of such women as Catherine Countess O'Neill, Nuala O'Donnell, and Rosa O' Dogarty, who died in Louvain in 1660. A prolific scholar and historian of seventeenth-century Ireland, Prof. Casway is the author of Own Roe O'Neill and the Struggle for Catholic Ireland (1984), as well as a study of Irish America and baseball titled Ed Delahanty in the Emerald Age of Baseball.

A well-known poet and critic haling from the North, Gerald Dawe has just published his sixth collection, Lake Geneva. Writing from Dublin, Dawe reviews a range of anthologies of Irish poetry from Brendan Kennelly's The Penguin Book of Irish Verse (1970) through Frank Ormsby's A Rage for Order: Poetry of the Northern Troubles (1992). He writes here in pursuit of an idea about the North, about the “Troubles,” and about the assumed moral authority of “Troubles” poetry. Debating the history and origins of the Belfast “Group” Dawe takes to be a critical distraction, while finding the origin and, consequently, the limits of the term “Northern poetry” lies directly in his aim. Having edited eight issues of Krino, Dawe has published some six volumes of tellingly observant criticism, including Against Piety: Essays in Irish Poetry (1995) and Stray Dogs and Dark Horses (2000). Poems from Gerald Dawe's fifth collection The Morning Train (1999) appeared in an early issue of New Hibernia Review.

Two short stories—”Beyond the Pale” by the novelist William Trevor and “The Cry” by the poet John Montague—offered early on prescient analyses of the gravity of the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland as, profoundly, a matter of story and storytelling. Montague's story is the object of Michael Parker's exegesis here. To the very local, often understated perceptions of Montague's story Parker brings a wealth of historical detail gleaned from the social and political histories of Ulster and also from the portrayal of the “Troubles” in the British media. By comprehensively contextualizing Montague's fable of a B-Special beating in rural Ulster and the ineffectual responses of the liberal journalist Peter Douglas and his nationalist shopkeeper father, Parker underscores both the accuracy and priority of Montague's native understanding of political and class divisions in the North. Well known for his early comprehensive reading of Seamus Heaney in Seamus Heaney: The Making of the Poet (1993), Prof. Parker also compiled The Hurt World: Short Stories of the Troubles (1995).

In less than a decade, Neil Jordan's film The Crying Game (1993) has overcome its “cult” status and achieved stature as a classic—and as a classic representation of Irish nationalism at work in the lives of individuals. As Donna Decker Schuster argues here, the film has universal appeal because each character in it enacts the elegy in rituals of mourning common to us all and, thus, well documented in Western literature and culture. In The Crying Game, these rituals echo the dramatic patterns of mourning present in such prior literary expressions of Irish nationalism as the aisling, Frank O'Connor's “Guests of the Nation,” and Brendan Behan's The Hostage. Consequently, the intricacies of Irish nationalism taken in the context of three decades of strife the Six Counties gives those same rituals a particular ethical complexity.

Digitization and the embrace of the World Wide Web have altered Irish Studies by quickly internationalizing research and reporting, as Patrick O'Sullivan's comments here evidence, having been translated into Galego (Galician) in Tempo Exterior. Despite that polylinguality, the fundamental internationalism and the fundamental interdisciplinarity of Irish Studies lie in the three hundred years of the Irish diaspora. Here, Prof. O'Sullivan appeals for increased conversation between academic disciplines in Irish Studies so as to counter what is inevitable about research into Irish history and culture—that it is Anglocentric, depending for obvious historical reasons on Anglophone archives. Writing out of his experience creating the five volumes of The Irish World Wide (1992–97), Prof. O'Sullivan sees in the present world of Irish Studies tensions that have proven inhibiting and that ought to prove energizing.

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