The Southern Review, Summer 1995, July, Volume 31, Number 3, A Special Issue: Contemporary Irish Poetry and

Criticism. This issue is a 5 Donut publication. LARGE. Dublin. Particulars: The Southern Review, 43 Allen Hall, Louisiana State University, 43 Allen Hall, Baton Rouge, Louisiana 70803-5005. Credit card orders: 800 861 3477. Whatever your favorite donuts, this issue of The Southern Review (TSR) offers you dozens. From front to back, its loaded. After picking it up two years ago, I finally got to read through it the other day. (If that seems unreasonable, consider that Eamon Patrick as fetus and wee baby seemed to take a little time in the meantime.) Ahhh...there it is as the first poem, one of best ever written, The Hag of Beare, that goes back to the 9th century and offers better insights to women in one poem than contemporary academic feminist (in contast to masculinist?) programs offer in a semester. One wonders of these courses teach Brian Merrimans The Midnight Court, about Aoibheall of Craig Liath -- the guardian spirit of the country and guarantor among other things of its womens right to sexual fulfillment and equality... [See: Seamus Heaney, Orpheus in Ireland: On Brian Merrimans The Midnight Court, pages 786-806]. The Hag of Beare has lasted over 1,000 years. Will any current feminist poems make be rememberd as long? The poem I know is a bit different from this translation by Brendan Kennelly (I am the Hag of Beare/many a man have I known...), but his translation captures its power and wisdom as deftly as the version with which I am familiar. The Hag of Beare The sea crawls from the shore Leaving there The despicable weed, A corpses hair. In me, The desolate withdrawing sea. Look at my skin Stretched tight on the bone. When kings have pressed their lips,

I dont hate the men Who swore the truth was in their lies One thing alone I hate --Womens eyes. The young sun Gives its youth to everyone, Touching everything with gold. In me, the cold. The cold. Yet still a seed Burns there. Women love only money now. but when I loved, I loved

Young men. Young men whose horses galloped On many an open plain Beating lightning from the ground. I loved such men. And still the sea Rears and plunges into me, Shoving, rolling through my head Images of the drifting dead. A soldier cries Pitifully about his plight; A king fades Into the shivering night. Does not every season prove That the acorn hits the ground? Have I not known enough of love To know its lost as soon as found? I drank my fill of wine with kings, Their eyes fixed on my hair. Now among the stinking hags I chew the cud of prayer. Time was the sea Brought kings as slaves to me. Now I near the face of God And the crab crawls through my blood. I loved the wine That thrilled me to my fingertips; Now the spinster wind Stitches salt into my lips. The coward sea Slouches away from me. Fear brings back the tide That made me stretch at the side Of him whod take me briefly for his bride. The sea grows smaller, smaller now. Farther, farther it goes Leaving me here where the foam dries On the deserted land, Dry as my shrunken thighs, As the tongue that presses my lips, As the veins that break through my hands.

With over several hundred pages, I am unable to review it all here. Instead, I will list The Southern Reviews Contemporary Irish Poetry and Criticism contents and you judge what you want to read enough to locate a copy. TO BEGIN Introduction, James Olney, Dave Smith The Hag of Beare, Brendan Kennelly The Destruction of Poetic Habitat, Biddy Jenkinson Border Sick-Call, John Montague From the Introduction by the Editors James Olney and David Smith. Why Irish poetry, and why in The Southern Review? ...The present special number may thus be seen as a continuation and, for the moment, culmination of a longstanding belief of the editors of The Southern Review that the work of Irish writers has a central-----perhaps paradigmatic-----significance for the literature of the twentieth century. Both of the founding editors of The Southern Review, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, maintained on a number of occasions that there is an analogy to be drawn between the literary and social circumstances obtaining in Ireland and in the American South. specifically they argued that both Ireland and the southern United States were primarily agrarian societies, at a great distance from the rituals, the mores, and the values of the commercial metropolitan centers of the modern world represented by London I the one instance, New York in the other. Further, they asserted that the language drawn upon by poets of Ireland and the American South-----and kept alive by them-----was, in sharp contrast with that of the metropolis, a provincial, oral, old language, and dialects, that differed from locale to locale rather than being a means of interchange smoothed and standardized to a bland sameness...Whether this linguistic claim about provincial difference and continued creative energy rising out of a agrarian/metropolitan conflict can still be made with regard to southern American speech is a vexed matter, but the present volume offers considerable evidence that it remains a very live issue in Ireland, a relatively small country where the poets language may be inflected by pressures from Irish, Irish English, Anglo-Irish, and English. As we look over the material gathered together in this volume we are struck by a curious, perhaps paradoxical, blending of a cosmopolitan tone with a determinedly local language-----as if Irish poets have penetrated so deep into the provincial that they issue on the other side in the cosmopolitan -----which, it might be, is akin to the speech and manners of the Old South.... ...The Irish Celt is sociable, Yeats declar[ed], as may be known from his proverb, Contention is better than loneliness. A century, it would seem, has made little difference to the character of the Irish Celt, and in putting together this issue we have found Irish poets and critics-----at least on this accounting of the matter-----to be very sociable indeed. We thank all contributors to this number for their sociability and their contentiousness and for keeping loneliness, not to mention boredom, well at bay. We hope that they and all our readers will feel as rewarded by the result as we at The Southern Review do.

ESSAY, POEMS-AND -TRANSLATIONS, ESSAY Writing in Modern Irish -- A Benign Anachronism? Maire Mhac an tSaoi Poems by Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, translated by Medbh McGuckian Daphne and Apollo The Marianne Faithfull Harido The Mermaid in the Labour Ward The Merfolk and the Written Word Poems by Medbh McGuckian, translated by Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill Foliage Ceiling Rose Operation Market Garden How things begin to happen: Notes on Eilean Ni Chuilleanain and Medbh McGuckian, Peter Sirr TRANSLATIONS Inhabited by a Song: As If: Maybe Theres Somebody Dreaming Me: Loneliness: Hunt, Ana Blandiana Eras End: Memory of Sunday, Mairtin ODireain, translated by Patrick Crotty My Mothers Burial, Sean ORiordain, translated by Patrick Crotty May Hogans Quatrains, Maire Mhac an tSaoi, translated by Patrick Crotty The Shannon Estuary Welcomes the Fish, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, translated by Patrick Crotty Shakespeare; Symmetry; Angle, Marin Sorescu, translated by Paul Muldoon ESSAYS Writing the Political Poem in Ireland, Eavan Boland Last Nights Fun, Ciaran Carson Hag Mothers and New Horizons, Katie Donovan POEMS Burbles, Derek Mahon Second Class Relics; Passive Smoking, Bernard ODonoghue entering the Mare; Grooming, Katie Donovan Noon Street; Ghosts, Pat Boran Penance; The Miracle, Tony Curtis The Silken Robe; Fionnuala, Joan McBreen The Riddle of the Sands, Ciaran Carson ESSAYS AND INTERVIEW

Ciaran Carsons Parturient Partition: The Crack in MacNeices More Than Buinn Batten An Interview with Michael Longley, Dermot Healy Loves Equal Realm, John Montague Acts and Monuments of an Unelected Nation: The Caelleach Writes about the Eilean Ni Chuilleanain COMHRA

Glass,

Renaissance,

Comhra, with a Forward and Afterword by Laura OConnor, Medbh McGuckian and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill POEMS The Girl Who Married the Reindeer, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain Chair; Milk, Maurice Riordian Site; Inner Cities, Deirdre Shanahan The Temptation of Phillida, Rita ann Higgins The Siege of Derry, Seamus Deane Western, Theo Dorgan Where Women Pray and Judge; time for Breaking; I wonder Now What Distance, Brendan Kennelly ESSAYS A Note on Irish Publishing, Thomas Kinsella Troubled Thoughts: Poetry Politics in Contemporary Ireland, Dennis ODriscoll Wrestling with Hartnett, Eamon Grennan POEMS The Swing, Seamus Heaney A Fire in My Head; Heart of hearts; Almost Forty, Gerald Dawe The Sea; Russian; the Compromise, Matthew Sweeney Spiders; Traditional Music, Fred Johnston The Otter woman, Mary OMalley My Beloved compares Herself to a Pint of Stout; A Snail in My Prime, Paul Durcan Underdeveloped Comedy: Patrick Kavanagh, Declan Diberd The parish and the Dream: Heaney and America, 1969-1987, Michael Allen POEMS Field System, Church Island, Paddy Bushe Home, Padraig Rooney The Waiting Deputies; Snap Election, Thomas McCarthy Firefly; Visit to Mount Jerome; Lake, Early Morning, Eamon Grennan

Economic Pressure; Vermont Aisling, Greg Delanty The Dry Cleaners; Ivory & Water; Phoenix, Michael Longley ESSAYS Irish Bards and American Audiences, Edna Longley In Celebration of the Irish Language, Maire Mhac an tSaoi The Irish language, however, is a rought root; again and again it gets to its feet after a hard fall... Orpheus in Ireland: On Brian Merrimans The Midnight Court, Seamus Heaney Although the last paragraph of Heaneys essay continues his analysis and defense of Brian Merrimans The Midnight Court against ignorance, nationalists, feminists, and others who would measure the greatest poems from Irelands past against ideologically loaded and only contemporary measures of worth, as an American, I was humbled by the weightiness of the scene he chronicles: everyday people from a small farms, much like the orchard my wifes family owns in West Virginia, all gathered about, enjoying, debating, and discussing the work. Here it is. Still, give the down-to-earthiness of this poems cast of characters and the directness of their speech, this would be a rather elevated note on which to end. Perhaps I can convey the ongoing reality or the poems life more simply by recollecting a Saturday evening last August when I had the privilege of unveiling a memorial to Brian Merriman on the shore of Loch Greine in Country Clare, where the opening scene of The Midnight Court is set. The memorial is a large stone quarried from a hill overlooking the lake, and the opening lines of the poem are carved on it in Irish. the people who attended the ceremony were almost all from the local district, and they were eager to point out the exact corner of the nearby field where the poet had run his hedge-school, the spot on the lough shore where he had fallen asleep and had his vision. This was and is the first circle within which Merrimans poem flourished and continues to flourish. Later that evening, in a marquee a couple of miles farther down the road, we attended a performance by the Druid Theatre Company from Galway in which the poem was given a dramatic presentation with all the boost and blast-off that song and music and topical allusion could provide. Hundreds of local people were in the tent, shouting and taking sides like a football [soccer?] crowd as the old man and the young woman battled it out and the president of the court gave her judgment. The psychosexual demons were no longer at bay but rampant and fully recognized, so that the audience, at the end of the performance, came away from the experience every bit as accused and absolved as the poet himself at the end of his poem. The profane perfection of mankind was going ahead, and civilisation was being kept on course: in a ceremony that was entirely convincing and contemporary, Orpheus had been remembered in Ireland. Were that I could have such an evening when I am out at my wifes family orchard in Levels, West Virginia in a similar American farming town. To find such a celebration of poetry, I would even drive to Paw Paw or Winchester! Id go to Intercourse or Bird-in-Hand or Blue Balls, Pennsylvania, even!