Poetry Ireland Review Issue 24 Editorial

Editorial

It could be said that Poetry Ireland Review No. 24 has an outward looking "European", even transnational, feel or flavour to it more so than is usual. Not a few of the poems submitted grow in one way or another out of the wider European "experience". Speaking generally, the promised full opening up of the EC in the early 1990's is, in a way, prefigured by a fresh opening up of consciousness in the Irish psyche toward its sister nations. For our more established writers this, of course, is not a new phenomenon: apart from the obvious masters-Joyce, Beckett, Banville - one thinks immediately of statured poets like Devlin and McGreevy who were in a real sense pioneers and beacons to newer generations.

It was my very great pleasure as editor to interview Richard Kearney for this edition. Richard has laboured for years, with others, to erect that very varied superstructure of ideas that we might term "the Irish mind", within which we all, eventually, might circulate and breathe a bit more freely. In my view, he is an unabashed European, who dreams of and sees a new flowering of the wider Irish consciousness in its true European home.

Face Mirroring Mine by Christine Michael states:

Landscapes have changed, but our bodies
Are cloned by extraordinary connections.

The continuing shameful enforced-in some minority of cases voluntary diaspora of our population goes on. The reality of hereditary economic failures, failures involving a reneging of will and imaginative capability, cannot be immediately remedied. If we are' to survive, a new European intellectual, social and artistic federation is necessary. The explosion in communications technology and systems, as well as our greater openness to continental cultures, where we have our roots, makes it accessible and possible. As, I hope, Richard Kearney's interview makes clear, there are opportunities to be grasped at both intellectual and artistic levels through new European structures coming into place, opportunities to help rid ourselves as islanders north and south of the many clichés of deadening histories. Provided we have the wit and are bold enough to do so.

I would like to express my regret to the very many poets, whose poems I liked, but was unable to publish, or publish more of. Perhaps if this quarterly were to become a monthly...? Finally, my thanks to all contributors who helped to make this edition possible; an especial thanks to Professor Terry Folley of UCD for establishing a link with the University of Burgos from where Ines Piaga introduces us to contemporary Spanish poetry; every good wish to Rory Brennan whose Trojan work for Poetry Ireland will long be remembered.