NEW HIBERNIA REVIEW
Samhradh/Summer 2003

floyd skloot The Simple Wisdom: Visiting Thomas Kinsella christie fox Macnas's Galway Parade: Constructing Community micheal o'siadhail Filíocht Nua: New Poetry james h. murphy The Literature of Nineteenth-Century Ireland sally barr ebest These Traits Also Endure: Contemporary Irish and Irish-American Women Writers bryan giemza The Technique of Sorrow: Patrick MacGill and the American Slave Narrative jerry nolan Edward Martyn's Struggle for an Irish National Theatre, 1899–1920 kevin donovan The Giant-Queller and the Poor Old Woman: Henry Brooke and the Two Cultures of Eighteenth-Century Ireland Exhibitions: Taispeántais gillian kelly, catriona mitchell, tom ward, misja weesies Between the Ghosts of O'Casey and Keane: Irish Theater, 2002 An Teanga Inniu: The Irish Language Today james j. blake University Extension Centers for the Gaeltachtaí Reviews: Léirmheasanna Clúdach: Cover Nuacht Faoi Údair: News of Authors

Clúdach: Cover The galleries of the Irish Museum of Modern Art: Áras Nua-Ealaine na hÉireann display not only contemporary sculpture and installation pieces, like Kathy Prendergast's Stack pictured on the spring cover of New Hibernia Review, but also key works by early Modern and middle twentieth-century painters, including canvases by the late Tony O'Malley (1913—2003). Never robust in health, O'Malley spent the first twenty-five years of his life in the Munster and Leinster Bank, all the while painting when he could. A self-taught artist, O'Malley first exhibited his work in the 1951 Oireachtas show, Dublin, where, three decades later, in 1981, he was awarded the Douglas Hyde medal for his work. In 1960 he settled in Cornwall and began painting full-time, returning to Clare Island, the home place of his mother's family, in 1970, and later visiting Ireland yearly until 1990, when he settled in Physicianstown, Callan, County Kilkenny. In 1993 Aosdána awarded the torc of the Saoi to him in a ceremony presided over by President Mary Robinson. Our cover for the summer, 2003, issue features O'Malley's Hawks Searching Corn, a gouache on paper measuring 78 by 56.65 cm. This vividly executed composition dates from 1968 when O'Malley had just returned to St. Ives from Ireland. In a manner typical of his abstracted landscapes of the time, O'Malley's brushwork and coloring recall fundamental natural shapes—a wing, a stalk of grain—all infused with a central luminosity that often proves a hallmark of O'Malley's painting. This gouache is one of a number of works in the Irish Museum of Modern Art's extensive McClelland Collection. Hawks Searching Corn and other works by O'Malley from the McClelland Collection were exhibited at the Irish Museum of Modern Art from July, 2001, to January, 2002. Readers interested in learning more about the span of O'Malley's accomplishments as a painter may wish to consult Tony O'Malley, edited by Brian Lynch, and published in association with Kilkenny's Butler Gallery in 1996. Again, we thank the director and board of the Irish Museum of Modern Art—and especially Catherine Marshall and Riann Coulter—for helping us to bring this work to our readers.

Editors’ Notes: Nótaí na nEagarthóirí
This issue opens with a memoir from the essayist and novelist Floyd Skloot, who studied with the Irish poet and translator Thomas Kinsella in the late 196os and early 1970s at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. In these few pages Skloot recounts his reunion with Kinsella at Laragh, County Wicklow, when—by then an established writer himself—he was on his way to the Böll Cottage on Achill Island in 1994. That recollection Skloot layers over memories of first meeting Kinsella just after the poet had seen The Tain into print. Ever since, Skloot has taken a fond and critical interest in Irish poets and poetry in such journals as The New Criterion. Among Skloot's noteworthy publications are the novel The Open Door (1999), a collection of poems called The Evening light (2001), a book-length essay on the illness experience titled The Night-Side (1996), and a prose meditation In the Shadow of Memory (2003).

Summer visitors to Galway are treated each July to the Galway Arts Festival, which often features a parade created by Macnas. Dr. Christie Fox here recounts both the thinking behind the 2000 Macnas parade, called The Listening Wind, and aspects of the different performances woven into its spectacular presentation. Drawing on ethnography and on twentieth-century dramatic and social theory, Fox discerns in such parades a new genre of public performance that employs outlandish costume and vibrant music, political satire and sheer “clowning around”—macnas, meaning “playfulness” and “frolic.” In the 2000 parade, for instance, such serious themes appeared as recent immigration to Ireland from Eastern Europe and Africa, and were treated satirically in speeches by a figure amed the Bag of Wind. Funded by the Arts Council of Ireland, each Macnas parade is a public entertainment that momentarily restores human community and, even, a traditional sense of Irish community in the West. Dr. Fox is a graduate of the folklore program at Indiana University.

Now well known to our readers as a poet, Micheal O'Siadhail recently published Our Double Time: Poems 1975–1995 (1998) and, most recently, a suite of new poems titled The Gossamer Wall (2002). In this selection of poems, O'Siadhail's lines stretch back into recollection and autobiography and always work their rhymes around the discovery of friendships and, especially, of coming into love. Musical themes recur in “Earlsfort Suite” and harmonize the “Aula Max” of University College Dublin with the discovery of learning and the scrutiny of examinations, and the scrutiny of self-examination. Dublin places have Joycean stature in O'Siadhail's poems, as when in “Trimelston” he reads the old deed to his Booterstown house and turns it into an affecting reflection on his long marriage. An indefatigable traveller and energetic performer, O'Siadhail frequently tours the United States and Canada.

Ever since the publication of The Field Day Anthology (1991) and, lately, Rogha an Chéid (2000), involved debates have arisen about the canon of Irish literature in English and Irish, Gaeilge and Béarla. Here, Dr. James Murphy takes to task the benign neglect that has favored twentieth-century Irish fiction over nineteenth-century novels and romances. The prejudice is, of course, a modern one that disparages the “Victorian” production of fiction. The prejudice is also a “revisionist” one that disparages the Catholic nationalism of Irish fiction published after Emancipation and the Famine. Dr. Murphy sets Irish literary and publishing history of the period in the context of the United Kingdom as a whole. Metropolitan tastes shifted after the Famine and Irish fiction no longer proved fashionable in London and Edinburgh, even though Irish fiction flourished in Dublin. Indeed, the ideals promulgated by Yeats and the Literary Revival after 1891 reacted against and came to overshadow the literary subjects and standards of bourgeois Catholics in Ireland. James H. Murphy recently published Abject Loyalty: Nationalism and Monarchy in Ireland during the Reign of Queen Victoria (2001).

Of course, nineteenth-century fiction by Irish women is a feature of the two-volume, three-thousand page Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing: Irish Women's Writing and Traditions (2002). In those pages, as in contemporary critical journals, one will find something about contemporary Irish fiction, but little about novels and stories by Irish-American women, as Dr. Sally Barr Ebest points out right away here. Newer Irish-American novelists, such as Anna Quindlen or Alice McDermott, receive only the scantiest of critical examination in Irish Studies; so, often, do such established writers as Maureen Howard and Mary Gordon. This not simply, according to Ebest, a question of genre and canonicity. It is a question as well of a shift in the ideological tide of feminism in both Ireland and in the United States of which one aspect is the reconciliation of feminist ideals with Catholicism. Ebest is the author of Writing from A to Z and the coeditor of Reconciling Feminism and Catholicism, forthcoming from the University of Notre Dame Press.

Issues of genre sometimes determine whether or not forgotten works ascend into the canon of Irish writing or remain forgotten, as in the case of the autobiographical fiction of Patrick MacGill. Here, Bryan Giemza treats as plainly autobiographical MacGill's Children of the Dead End (1914), a work that established his reputation as a “naive” writer. Indeed, MacGill's fictions, taken together, resemble Sean O'Casey's fictionalized autobiographies and the Gaelic peasant autobiographies that came shortly after. Perhaps another genre frames MacGill's liberation story, which Giemza suggests may be American slave narratives like Frederick Douglass's Narrative, published in 1846 in Dublin. Certainly the first edition of MacGill's story bears all the printed, outward hallmarks of the genre. Bryan Giemza has recently published on Walker Percy's fiction in Southern Cultures, and is currently researching Irish writers of the American South.

Before Miss Horniman gave Yeats the Abbey in 1904, the directors, playwrights, and actors of the Irish Literary Theatre had divided aims. One nationalist bent was to follow the lead of Ibsen and address the problems of middle-class Catholic Ireland. Another was to follow the lead of Yeats, Hyde, and Synge and reinvent the life of the Irish countryman in folkloric, mythic terms. As Jerry Nolan details here, Edward Martyn's ambitions as a dramatist were first encouraged by the Irish Literary Theatre owing to his fiscal gifts, but increasingly his practical views of Irish life and emergent nationality ran counter to those of Yeats's Revival. Unlike Yeats, Martyn was always a partisan of performing contemporary European drama. In 1914—with Thomas MacDonagh and James Plunkett—Martyn formed the inherently republican Irish Theatre Company, which performed right through the Rising until 1920. Jerry Nolan's most recent publication is The Tulira Trilogy of Edward Martyn (1859–1923), Irish Symbolist Dramatis (2003).

Irish drama of the eighteenth century—by Farquahar, Sheridan, Goldsmith and others —depends upon the rigid social structures of the Protestant Nation for its comedy and satire. Dublin loved satire and scurrilous burlesque, as readers of Swift know. Henry Brooke's ballad opera Jack the Giant Queller (1749), however, proved too much for Dublin Castle and was suppressed after one performance. Professor Kevin Donovan suggests here that Brooke's stage satire in support of the agitator Charles Lucas gives evidence that Irish cultural divisions, if not social ones, were less strict than is often thought. Brooke's hero resolves to free his country from “Violence, Oppression, and Wrong” because he has had a vision of the poor old woman of ballad legend—an tSeanbhean Bhocht— fifty years before the Rising of 1798. With Christopher Wheatley, Dr. Donovan recently edited the two-volume anthology of Irish Drama of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (2003).

Writing from the National University of Ireland, Galway, Gilliam Kelly, Catriona Mitchell, Tom Ward, and Misja Weesjes survey the 2002 Irish theater season, including the Dublin Theatre Festival. Commenting on Keane's death in May, 2002, they note Garry Hynes's revival of Keane's impressive first play Sive. Keeping Keane in mind, the writers suggest that contemporary dramatists like Patricia Burke Brogan or Bernard Farrell have found Irish themes and effective techniques and yet lack Keane's power to move an audience. Imports from Canada and the Czech Republic excited audiences during the Dublin Theatre Festival, while Marina Carr's Ariel and Sebastian Barry's Hinterland provoked the critics to dismay and disapproval. The usual controversies followed in the letters pages of the Dublin papers. In the end, the Lyric Theatre's production of Tom Murphy's Conversations on a Homecoming and Ben Barnes's seventy-fifth anniversary production of The Plough and the Stars at the Abbey stood out as highlights of the festival.

University-level instruction in technology and the sciences through the medium of Irish has been limited not only by the availability of instructors fluent in Irish and expert in their fields, but also by the will of the Irish to invest heavily in such services. With the increase in Gaelscoileanna through the country and with an increase in Irish-speaking secondary-level graduates in technology and the sciences, Irish universities now face the need to offer more Irish-language instruction in disciplines other than the Liberal Arts. Between 2000 and 2002, the Gaeltacht Commision issued several comprehensive reports on university-level education in Irish and a plan to disperse technical instruction through the Gaelteachtaí from Donegal down the west coast to Carna and An Cheathrú Rua. Here, the scholar and Irish-language broadcaster Dr. James Blake assesses those reports and the prospects for the success of such efforts in the context of the history of such efforts dating from the Gaeltacht Commission Report of 1926. Crucial to the success of these efforts will be the character of the Language Rights Bill, which—at the time of this publication—still languishes in the Dáil.

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