NEW HIBERNIA REVIEW
Fomhar/Autumn 2003
 

tim robinson The Irish Echosphere in 2003 ciaran mcclean Northern Ireland and the Democratic Left Party, 1989–1999 daniel tobin The Parish and Lost America: Michael Coady's All Souls (1997) enda wyley Filíocht Nua: New Poetry donna potts “When Ireland Was Still Under a Spell”: The Poetry of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill john turpin Domhnall Ó Murchadha: Sculptor with a Gaelic Vision matthew erin plowman Irish Republicans and the Indo-German Conspiracy of World War I maria-elena doyle Strangers in Her House: Staging a Living Space for Northern Ireland thomas e. jordan An Enlightened Utilitarian: Thomas Drummond (1797–1840) Radharc ar gCúl: A Backward Glance cormac k. h. o'malley The Publication History of On Another Man's Wound 140ltimothy m. o'neil “We Knew Where Our Sympathies Were”: Social and Economic Views in On Another Man's Wound mary cosgrove Ernie O'Malley's Art References in On Another Man's Wound Reviews: Léirmheasanna Clúdach: Cover

Clúdach: Cover The McClelland Collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art features some ninety examples of the Belfast painter Colin Middleton (1910–1983), whose 1958 oil painting Woman: Carnmoon, Portrush is featured on the cover of this autumn issue of New Hibernia Review. Like the Ulster sculptor F. E. McWilliam, Middleton mastered the Surrealist idiom of late 1930s British art. Middleton's work—from the canvases of the Belfast Blitz through his late Australian and Northern landscapes—employs motifs notable in works by Dali, De Chirico, Kandinsky, Klee, Magritte, and De Chirico. Middleton's postwar exhibitions in such Dublin venues as Waddington and Hendriks galleries carried manifold Continental influences into Irish painting. The size and pose of the image in Middleton's Woman monumentally counters the usual Romantic, nationalist image of the allegorical female image of Ireland. Middleton's coloring of the gaunt figure and the background curve of shoreline states a bleak melancholy verging on unspoken anguish. A believer in liberalizing social structures, Middleton was a political idealist and ally of the poet and curator John Hewitt. Honored by an MBE in 1969, Middleton was a prominent figure in Irish artistic life in the 1970s. For helping us bring this striking example of Middleton's influential painting to our readers, we thank Catherine Marshall and Riann Coulter of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, The Royal Hospital, Kilmainham.

Editors’ Notes: Nótaí na nEagarthóirí

Known to many American readers for his encyclopedic, yet deeply personal volumes about Inis Mór, Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage and Stones of Aran: Labyrinth, Roundstone's Tim Robinson is a man of many parts—a naturalist, cartographer, artist, essayist, and most recently, in Tales and Imaginings (2002), a writer of fiction. In June, 2003, Robinson delivered a plenary address at the annual meeting of the American Conference for Irish Studies, held at the University of St Thomas. In that address, Robinson revisited an idea he first articulated in 2001, that of the Irish “echosphere”—his term for “the familiar reciprocity of land and people in Ireland.” Here, New Hibernia Review is honored to present Robinson's thoughtful, cautionary assessment of Ireland's changed relation with the natural world. Readers who wish to learn more of Tim Robinson's writings and maps may wish to visit his web site at www.iol.ie/~tandmfl/

One of the enduring frustrations for those who seek to understand Northern Ireland is that the conflict there has so readily lent itself to such simplistic analysis as a “two tribes” interpretation. As Ciaran McClean notes here, there are many in the North who simply do not feel at home in the mainstream nationalist and Unionist camps. McClean argues that the short-lived Democratic Left Party, though never a major force in the province's electoral politics, nonetheless served to challenge monolithic sectarianism throughout the 1990s—and that its eventual failure and disbandment provide lessons on which future progressive movements may draw. Currently an activist with the Building Bridges cross-community group, Ciaran McClean is a graduate of the Peace and Conflict Studies program at Magee College.

Michael Coady's All Souls—first published in 1997 and reissued by Gallery Press in 2001 in a revised, expanded version—has been recognized as one of the most successful multigenre works to come out of Ireland since John Montague's The Rough Field. Blending poetry, memoir, fiction, and documentary material, Coady—a lifelong resident of Carrick-on-Suir, Tipperary—charts what Professor Daniel Tobin calls here a passage “beyond the particular center of his inherited world.” Tobin pays special attention to the long closing essay in All Souls, “The Uses of Memory,” wherein Coady, in pursuing a long-vanished great-grandfather through the newspaper files and genealogical records of Philadelphia more than a century ago, both probes the double nature of the Irish diaspora and effects a healing across generations. Daniel Tobin has recently compiled and edited a definitive anthology of Irish-American poetry, forthcoming from the University of Notre Dame Press.

Enda Wyley's third collection of poems Diary of a Fat Man will soon be published by the Dedalus Press of Dublin. Two earlier collections, Eating Baby Jesus (1994) and Socrates in the Garden (1998) established her among a new generation of Dublin writers—a generation for whom Irish insularity is, at most, a fading memory, as “Two Women in Kosovo” shows here. Eating Baby Jesus features surreal manipulations of the speaking voice, while in Socrates in the Garden (1998) Wyley's lines and forms seek a looser texture to express her engagement both with the mysteries of affection and Ireland's civic life in the late 1990s. In her poems, Wyley mixes contemporary observation, allusions to Gaelic lore, to the Classics, and to contemporary details of Dublin life. A past winner of a British National Poetry Competition and of Australia's Vincent Buckley Prize, Enda Wyley is currently at work on All Things, a novel, and she has a children's book in press titled Boo and Bear.

The form of nature writing known as dinnsheanchas—that branch of Gaelic tradition that deals with the deep lore of places—both animates and continues to find development in the poetry of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, probably the most widely studied Irish-language poet writing today. Here, Dr. Donna Potts looks closely at a number of poems in which Ní Dhomhnaill invokes magical transformations, and finds that these contemporary poems are heir to a much older vision of the world. Ní Dhomhnaill's rendering of nature, she writes, “may be viewed as an attempt to revive the Celtic worldview as reflected in Irish poetry that predates English colonization.” A scholar of far-ranging interests, Donna Potts's many articles on Irish poetry are complemented by her book Howard Nemerov and Objective Idealism (1994), and, recently, by her examinations of television's Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

A prominent figure in Dublin's National College of Art and Design, Domhnall Ó Murchadha (1914–1991) led the Department of Sculpture from 1967 to 1978 and served as the college's director until his retirement in 1980. As Prof. John Turpin recounts here, Ó Murchadha saw the transformation of the college after the ructions of the 1960s. Well connected to cultural and academic leaders of the 1940s and 1950s, Ó Murchadha's heart lay with the Gaelic Revival, in whose spirit he devised a simplified version of monumental carving based on tradition Irish craftsmanship. Even such details as Gaelic lettering earned him praise. Ó Murchadha was often commissioned to execute likenesses of prominent political and literary both figures; his craft and vision expressed an instantly recognizable period idiom that is now returning to favor in Ireland. John Turpin is the author of two indispensable works of Irish art history: A School of Art in Dublin since the Eighteenth Century (1995) and Oliver Sheppard, Symbolist Sculptor of the Irish Cultural Revival (2001).

In international relations, the axiom that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” has often proven a policy of questionable value, but what cannot be questioned is that nations at war seem only too happy to adapt this strategy. Dr. Matthew Plowman brings to light here a little-known episode from the time of the First World War, that of Irish involvement in the Indo-German Conspiracy, when German officials attempted to orchestrate an alliance between nationalist revolutionaries in India, Ireland, and Irish America against their common enemy of England. This complicated plot touched on the activities of such notable Irish leaders as Eamon de Valéra, Roger Casement, John Devoy, and even the philologist Kuno Meyer; its American dimensions include a sensational 1917 gunrunning trial in San Francisco. Matthew Plowman will present further research on the Indo-German Conspiracy at the NUI-Galway Conference on Colonialism in June, 2004.

The domestic setting of the home plays a central role in both Bill Morrison's 1989 trilogy A Love Song for Ulster and in Stewart Parker's Pentecost (1987). As Maria-Elena Doyle argues here, it is the influence of the figure of Cathleen Ni Houlihan in the settings of these plays from Northern Ireland that gives such potency to the site of home. Doyle links the home to ideas of nationality at play in the “Troubles,” as well as to the Big House. By doing so, Doyle reveals that the domestic spaces in Parker's and Morrison's drama create not only a setting for ideological conflict between republicans and Unionists, but also an arena where the inherited destruction of the past can be worked through to resolution. Dr. Doyle lately contributed an examination of Irishness and the Gothic to the forthcoming Nation and Identity in Twentieth-Century Irish Drama.

Dr. Thomas E. Jordan—familiar to readers of New Hibernia Review for his past contributions on the history of Irish census-taking and on statistical analyses of Victorian Ireland—returns to our pages in this issue with an instructive biographical study of Thomas Drummond (1797–1840). Born in Scotland and educated in London, Drummond came to Ireland as a military engineer with the Ordnance Survey that would forever change the namescape and historical memory of the country. He stayed on to serve in various capacities—as a railway developer, the director of the Boundary Commission set up to apportion parliamentary seats, and eventually as under secretary for Ireland. As Jordan tracks Drummond's career, we see an even-handed administrator committed to pragmatic measures that would improve the Irish quality of life—as well as an under secretary often crosswise with local politician and scoundrels.

“Radharc ar cGúl/Backward Glance” periodically holds out an Irish book, or other work, for a fresh round of appraisal and reappraisal. In this issue, we gather three new perspectives on a well-known account of the Troubles, Ernie O'Malley's On Another Man's Wound (1936). First, the author's son Cormac K. H. O'Malley traces the book's circuitous publication history—a history that he himself has helped to advance. Among the remarkable chapters in this story is the son's discovery of a copy of the book inscribed to him by his father three decade's earlier, and annotated in O'Malley's own hand. Next, the art historian Mary Cosgrove charts one of the subtle subtexts in On Another Man's Wound—its author's informed fascination with the visual arts. She notes that the wealth of artistic allusion in O'Malley's prose, as well as his regular visits to the National Gallery even as the civil war raged, adumbrate his activities as an art collector and commentator in later life. Writing from Belfast, Mary Cosgrove published Paul Henry and Achill Island in 1995. Finally, Dr. Timothy O'Neil examines the classic memoir from the perspective of an economic historian, and proposes that—like many republican idealists—O'Malley never fully reconciled the contending ideals of economic reform, nationalism, and egalitarianism. Timothy O'Neil's publications and research interests focus on Irish labor both at home and abroad.

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