New Hibernia Review

Until recently, in Ireland and elsewhere, the erasure of divorced women from community life was commonplace. In “Nowhere on the Chart,” Anne Marie Kennedy looks back at the Ireland of the early 1990s, when she left a bad marriage and stepped into a legal and social free-fall. She recalls with bemusement (and more) the many awkward moments in an Ireland without legal divorce when, for example, friends and family simply could not figure out what to call her. In the end, Irish society has come around to admitting what Kennedy insisted from the start: that a divorced woman also occupies a place and has a name. Anne Marie Kennedy’s fiction and poetry has appeared in ROPES, Black Heart Magazine, the Galway Review, and elsewhere. She won the Molly Keane Creative Writing Award in 2014.

Playwright Brian Friel (b. 1929) stands as a towering figure in Irish drama today, and yet he remains a deeply private man who rarely speaks publicly. We are fortunate indeed, then, to be able to present the brief and previously unpublished “secular prayers” that Friel offered at the opening of the new Lyric Theatre in Belfast in 2011. In these few lines, Friel voices what amounts to a personal creed on the nobility and the promise of “that strange and almost sacred pursuit we call theatre.” We are grateful, too, to Dr. Marilynn J. Richtarik—a widely published scholar of Northern Irish theater and an advisory editor for this journal—for having secured these “prayers” for publication, and for her thoughtful introduction.

The pervasive effects of American popular culture on Irish life have been well chronicled; for example, the jazz invasion in the 1930s is a subtext of the current film Jimmy’s Hall, and in Angela’s Ashes, the young Frank McCourt dreams of the America he saw in the movies. At about the same time, the blockbuster novel Gone with the Wind (1936) was dominating Irish book sales, and as Dr. Amy Clukey shows, the Irish literati were keenly aware, and keenly resentful, of its success. Patrick Kavanagh and Flann O’Brien were among the many who [End Page 5] sniped at the novel and film, delivering their jabs in what Clukey calls “a potent mix of sour grapes and sincere criticism.” Kavanagh’s contempt was of a piece with his dismissal of popular culture in general; O’Brien’s objections, however, were also tinged with financial envy. And Mitchell’s largely feminine readership was especially galling to the two hyper-opinionated authors who wrote with masculine bravado. Amy Clukey’s articles have appeared in such journals as Modern Fiction Studies, American Literature, and Twentieth-Century Literature.

When Fianna Fáil came to power in 1932, its protectionist policies launched the Economic War that would last until 1938—and, indeed, that would shape Irish policy for decades after. Dr. Kenneth L. Shonk, Jr., has trawled the archive of the Irish Press, the party’s “house organ,” with a view to discerning the role that the party saw for women in the trade war. The Irish Press devoted extensive space to women’s issues, albeit in such stereotypical matters as recipes and fashion, especially fashion that might display a nationalist flair. Shonk contends that—despite de Valera’s later pronouncements on women in the 1937 Constitution and the 1943 “comely maidens” speech—the Irish Press’s vision of women as consumers was rooted in a surprisingly progressive conviction: that men and women alike could accept and use aspects of modernity to build the Irish nation. Kenneth L. Shonk, Jr., is currently researching and writing on the symbolic meaning of Ireland to the decolonizing nations of the 1960s.

Loss animates the poems of Harry Clifton (b. 1952) presented in this issue’s “Filíocht Nua” section. “Tipstaff” is an elegy, not only for the late William Bates who held that courtroom positon, but also an elegy for Dublin’s disappearing trades and their traditions. In the sequence that follows, “Cascade at the Fourth Lock,” Clifton’s speaker is trying to understand a lifelong process of coming to terms with a death. These allusive sonnets are rife with...