NEW HIBERNIA REVIEW
Earrach/Spring 2004

celia de freine On the Border of Memory: Childhood in a Divided Ireland john redmond “All the Answers”: The Influence of Auden on Kavanagh's Poetic Development von groarke Filíocht Nua: New Poetry 50lmaria kurdi “Really All Danger”: An Interview with Sebastian Barry david gardiner The Other Irish Renaissance: The Maunsel Poets ciara breathnach The Role of Women in the Economy of the West of Ireland, 1891–1923 leric levy The Mastering of Selfhood in Kathleen Ferguson's The Maid's Tale claire norris The Big House: Space, Place, and Identity in Irish Fiction Traditional Music: Ceol Tráidisiúnta sean williams Melodic Ornamentation in the Connemara Sean-nós Singing of Joe Heaney Léirmheasanna: Reviews News of Authors: Nuacht faoi Údair Cover: Clúdach

Clúdach: Cover New Hibernia Review's covers in the 2004 volume—the year that marks the centennial of James Joyce's famous Bloomsday, or June 16, 1904, on which Ulysses occurs—will pay tribute to this literary milestone by offering a quartet of photographic images of Edwardian Dublin. We are assisted in this by the generous cooperation of Ireland's National Photographic Archive. Visitors to Ireland this year—thousands of whom will converge in the capital city in mid-June for a Joycean extravaganza—will enjoy the exhibition Dubliners, which opened in March of this year and runs through the end of August at the archive located in Meeting House Square in Dublin's Temple Bar district. Dubliners is a photographic record of life in the city at the turn of the last century, a period immortalized in the works of Joyce. The exhibition comprises 71 photographs all taken by Dr. J. J. Clarke, a medical doctor from Castleblayney, County Monaghan who was a student at the Royal University Dublin between 1897 and 1904. The image presented on our cover shows two dapper—and , one is tempted to say, cocky—young bravos on the steps of the National Library, probably university students. These jaunty figures immediately call to mind the scenes in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man when young Stephen Dedalus, standing on these same steps, offers his high-minded aesthetic theories, and Chapter 9, “Scylla and Charybdis,” from Ulysses. In that chapter, Stephen is again ensconced at the National Library, discussing Hamlet with his intellectual companions until the chapter ends as Buck Mulligan arrives to mock everyone for their literary pretensions. We thank the National Photographic Archive/An tAircív Náisiúnta Grianghrafadóireachta, and especially its curator, Sara Smyth, for its kind permission to present this delightful photograph to the readers of New Hibernia Review.

Editors’ Notes: Nótaí na nEagarthóirí
Well-known to TG4 viewers as a scriptwriter for the serial Ros na Rúin, the poet and memoirist Celia de Fréine returns to our pages in this issue. Casting back to the late 1950s and 1960s, here she recounts a childhood spent in Rathmines and in County Down in a family divided by the the Troubles of the 1920s. The daughter of parents transplanted from the North to Dublin, De Fréine describes a childhood spent in neighborhoods that, no matter whether North or South, constituted an intimate society structured by invisible distinctions and contradictions of class, caste, and sect. Celia de Fréine has received numerous awards, starting with the Patrick Kavanagh Award in 1994, for her contributions to writing in Irish. Her forthcoming book of poems Fiacha Fola won the 2004 Cló Iar-Chonnachta Literary Prize of £5,000 partly sponsored by Údaras na Gaeltachta.

Since his death in 1967, the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh has risen steadily in repute, especially among contemporary Irish poets. Kavanagh's poems may seem to have little in common with the transatlantic verse of W. H. Auden, yet, as John Redmond shows in his survey of Kavanagh's oeuvre—and especially The Great Hunger (1941)—the Monaghan poet was continuously absorbing, rejecting, and negotiating with Auden's sensibility. Dr. Redmond charts four distinct phases in Kavanagh's poetic career, each marked by distinct shifts in authorial voice that may be linked to Auden's example. Indeed, Redmond notes Kavanagh's own lines in “Grey Liffey” that “Auden knows all the answers, and the question / Is where can we find a question to ask.” John Redmond reviews contemporary poetry frequently in Ireland and Britain. Thumb's Width, his first collection, was published by Carcanet in 2001.

A native of Edgeworthstown, County Longford, Vona Groarke has published three collections of poetry: Shale (1994), which won the Brendan Behan Prize; Other People's Houses (1999); and Flight (2002). She composed, as well, the introduction to the Gallery Press edition of Goldsmith's The Deserted Village (2002). Readers of Groarke's new poems in this issue will find that her poetry also captures the many sadnesses of Irish places: the anomie of lives lived in hotel rooms and, in “The Middle of Nowhere,” of days busy with nothing following a break-up. Interested in the syntax of self-consciousness, Groarke's lines evoke wounded landscapes and interiors where small details loom psychically large, as in “The Local Accent,” where “a slipping aspen leaf makes barely a flicker, / one gaffe in the conversation between the current and the flow. . . .” Wake Forest University published Flight, including a selection from Groarke's earlier books, in 2004. With Conor Callaghan, Vona Groarke currently holds the Heimbold Chair in Irish Studies at Villanova University.

Writing from Hungary, Maria Kurdi has published frequently on Irish drama, including Codes and Masks: Aspects of Identity in Contemporary Irish Plays in an Intercultural Context (2001). In this issue, Dr. Kurdi interviews the Irish playwright and novelist Sebastian Barry, best known for The Steward of Christendom (1995). In a far-ranging conversation conducted by e-mail, Kurdi asks Barry to consider such matters as how and why he first turned to drama, Ireland's inheritance of class and colonialism, and the geographic settings of his plays His answers offer the reader generous views of Barry's own understandings of his creative processes. Barry responds also to the controversies surrounding his presumed portrayal of the former Taoiseach Charles Haughey in Hinterland (2002). Barry's translation of Lorca's The House of Bernarda Alba opened at the Abbey Theatre in April, 2003.

When we think of the “Irish Renaissance,” we tend to imagine it as the creation of a constellation of authors whose individual genius moved Ireland to the fore of Western literature. Here, Prof. David Gardiner reminds us that authorial genius alone does not a renaissance make. Visionary editors and publishers can be every bit as creative, the case in point being the efforts of Dublin's Maunsel Press, founded in 1905 by Belfastman George Roberts. Titles by such famous names as Synge, Æ, and James Stephens appear among the more than 600 issued by Maunsel before its dissolution in 1926. So do titles by Hugo Doak, Alice Milligan, and Joseph Campbell—all authors deserving of renewed critical attention. Maunsel also gave us one of the essential accounts of the Easter Rising, James Stephens's The Insurrection in Dublin (1916). An energetic scholar, Dr. Gardiner is the author of “Befitting Emblems of Adversity” (2001), a major study of Spenser and Irish writing from Yeats to Montague.

Surveying social change in Ireland from the turn of the twentieth century on, a new generation of Irish historians has painted a picture not so much of Ireland's nationalization or Gaelicization, but of bourgeois modernization, including the domestication of Irishwomen. Here, responding to Joanna Bourke's seminal study Husbandry to Housewifery (1993), Dr. Ciara Breathnach examines the parliamentary reports of the Congested Districts Board (1891–1923). The statistics in those reports reveal that the CDB regarded Irishwomen in the West as more economically minded and adept than their menfolk and that reform measures sought to support their economic status even as such modernization efforts as the Cooperative Movement was creating male employment in the locale and, consequently, shifting fiscal control in the family from women to men. A graduate in Irish history and language from the National University Ireland, Cork, Dr. Breathnach served as a teaching fellow and researcher at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, until June, 2003.

Despite its incisive psychological portrayal of the contemporary strictures of Irish Catholicism, Kathleen Ferguson's 1995 novel The Maid's Tale has yet to receive critical attention commensurate with its art. Here, Eric P. Levy reveals that Ferguson's portrayal of the journey of her protagonist Brigid Keane from sheltered servitude to mastery of her own identity provides her readers with an Irish bildungsroman. In a social setting as scrupulous as that in Joyce's Dubliners, Brigid must overcome the “shaming gaze” that her peers and her employer, Father Mann, inflict on her in order to find autonomy. Prof. Levy demonstrates that Ferguson's depiction of Brigid's acquisition of an independent identity also examines how such rituals as Ash Wednesday rituals or the sacrament of the Eucharist may restrict psychological and spiritual individuality. Levy sees that Brigit overcomes the inhibiting role of dutiful servant through reversing the Christological notion of kenosis. Dr. Levy is the author of many articles in many distinguished academic periodicals, including such Irish Studies journals as The Colby Quarterly, Irish University Review,and The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, as well as Beckett and the Voice of Species (1980).

Considering the wealth of twentieth-century fiction by Irish writers from Moore to Tóibín, perhaps the traits of the postcolonial romance are not sufficient to distinguish Irish fiction as “Irish.” Here, Claire Norris ranges from Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1800) to William Trevor's Fools of Fortune (1983) to discern the subgeneric traits of the Irish novel. Her synoptic view reminds us not only of the stylistic adventurousness of much Irish fiction, but also of its ability to center heterogeneous details and dramatic effects in one psychological space and social location—the peculiar institution of the Big House, or its simulacrum. Fictionally, Irish national identity is forged in this particular locus of its oppression. Claire Norris recently presented a paper at the Constructoins of Irishness Conference, University of Salford, Manchester.

Devotees of Irish traditional music in the United States revere the Connacht-style sean-nós singing of Joe Heaney (1919–1984), who taught in the ethnomusicology departments of Wesleyan University and, just before his death, at the University of Washington in Seattle. In this issue, Dr. Sean Williams, one of Heaney's students, examines interviews with Heaney and examples of his performances archived in Seattle so as to discern his particular grammar of ornamentation in such standards as “A Stor Mo Chroí,” “Amhran na Páise,” and “A Raibh Tú ag an gCarraig?” In Connemara songs, as recorded by Heaney, such ornaments as melisma occur on the unstressed syllable, not on the “pulse” and not when the ornament might disturb the melodic contour. Prof. Williams travels frequently to Ireland and to Indonesia. She is the author of numerous musicological articles as well as The Sound of the Ancestral Ship: Highland Music of West Java (2001).

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