Poetry Ireland Review Issue 17 Editorial

Editorial

With this issue my editorial responsibilities for the Review end. Contributions not already returned will be held over until another editor can make his/her selections. This will probably involve some delays but patience may be rewarded. The next issue will be a special Latin-American edition for which Ciaran Cosgrove will be responsible. And then the new editor will take things from there.
I'll miss the familiar brown envelopes, the floods of mail, the excitement of reading a poem by someone I've never heard of or met whose words lift off the page in that way good poetry does. But I won't miss having to send poems back, particularly those which are good of their kind but which don't quite justify inclusion in what for each issue is a competitive, limited space. And there is always the chance of editorial obtuseness (how many publishers turned down Orwell's Animal Farm?). For this reason I think Poetry Ireland's policy of employing an editor for a limited period a sensible one. No one editor gets the chance to establish an orthodoxy and in the very fertile state of poetry in Ireland at the moment it is vital that differing critical sensibilities get a chance to sift through what is being contributed. So I wish my successor the best of luck.