The ‘Irish Review’, then and now

The essayist Hubert Butler wrote in 1954: "An Irish journal is like a sortie from a besieged city." Since then some sieges have been lifted. Others may persist. Meanwhile the "journal", even in online mode, has come to seem a faintly archaic medium. This was less so in 1986, when, with Kevin Barry, Tom Dunne and Richard Kearney, I became a founding editor of the Irish Review.

Cork University Press has just published the 50th issue, which commemorates Seamus Heaney. Looking back, I thought I would compare the new issue with the first.

Certainly, a major link is poetry. Ciaran Carson appears in both issues. And there's another shared poet contributor. The Heaney issue contains an elegy by Paul Durcan, Breaking News. The first has Derek Mahon's essay on Durcan, with a pastiche Durcan poem: Poet Arrested for Distributing Daffodils in Castlebar.

In similar fashion, Durcan’s elegy wonderfully ventriloquises Heaney’s voice: the inner voice of his poetry, speaking from somewhere else. The last two lines fuse Heaney’s earthly and heavenly fathers: “And now I put the key for the first time / Into the door of my father’s house.”

Poets' ability to ventriloquise one another suggests a mutual awareness for which the word "tradition" can seem too stodgy. And it's not just "Irish" poets. The first issue has translations from the Romanian poet Marin Sorescu and Carson's poem Calvin Klein's Obsession, which alludes to the nexus of smell and memory in Edward Thomas's Old Man.

The Scottish poet Douglas Dunn reviews Paul Muldoon's (still controversial) Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry. And this is where Heaney links the two issues. Dunn's review highlights Heaney's "beautiful" poem The Harvest Bow, which begins: "As you plaited the harvest bow / You implicated the mellowed silence in you . . ." In the latest issue the poem sparks off Peter McDonald's essay Heaney's Implications: a close reading of his formal subtlety.

Dunn contrasts The Harvest Bow with the depiction of a shopkeeper's killing in Station Island, and sees the dialectics between the poems as exemplifying Heaney's public role: the "curse or blessing of introverted spokesmanship" at "the dark crossroads where literature and politics meet".

Several contributors to the 50th issue revisit the matter of Heaney’s “introverted spokesmanship” in time of civil war.

Cultural crossroads

The Irish Review aimed to be a crossroads for literature and politics, history and culture: to be more than an interdisciplinary academic journal.

The poems and critiques of poetry in the first issue belong to that mix. We once printed a 22-page work in couplets by Patrick J Quinn, which recorded casualties of the "Troubles" to date: a "roll call of the dead" that anticipated Lost Lives.

The first issue contains articles by Hubert Butler (“Ireland in the Nuclear Age”) and Michael Viney (“The Irish Experience of Nature”). It begins with a piece by Roy Foster, which became an unwitting, if not necessarily agreed, manifesto: “We are all Revisionists now”.

The Irish Review has played its part in the culture war. That includes publishing Ailbhe Smyth's landmark feminist essay "The Floozie in the Jacuzzi".

It also aimed to establish a north-south Irish axis, complicated by other geographical and intellectual co-ordinates. Here the Crane Bag (1977-85), the journal founded by Richard Kearney and Mark Patrick Hederman, had set a challenging precedent. And no journal of the time could avoid being a forum for Troubles-inspired "condition of Ireland" writings.

In the first Irish Review Fergus O'Ferrall reflects on Henry Cooke and Daniel O'Connell: on the "mutual incomprehension" between these icons of "the Irish Protestant and Catholic traditions". O'Ferrall connects O'Connell and Cooke with an Ireland "where the results of the recent divorce referendum overshadow the hopes of the new Hillsborough agreement". Well, we have moved on since 1986: all peace processors now.

Or have we? The last time I met Seamus Heaney was at the Merriman Summer School in Lisdoonvarna, two weeks before his death. The school’s theme was “North and South”. Speakers debated whether the Republic and Northern Ireland had drifted apart again now the Northern Irish question had supposedly been resolved.

The school’s convenor Andy Pollak has described relations between civil society north and south as “underdeveloped” and underconceptualised.

‘The North is dead’

Perhaps the Irish Review should go back to basics. A recent issue quotes an academic who proposed a book on north-south relations to a Dublin publisher, only to be told: "The North is dead. Why not write something on 1916?"

"The Politics of Commemoration" was a 1995 Irish Review article by Tom Dunne. Twenty years on, with boredom in some quarters, fervour in others, we might at least get our commemorative act together.

Perhaps the north-south axis of Seamus Heaney’s imagined Ireland is also underexplored, as are the aesthetic and cultural ramifications of his “northernness”.

Critics of Heaney’s poetry come from all over the world. Jahan Ramazani’s contribution to the Heaney issue is called “Heaney’s Globe”. There are other fine essays by academics from the United States, Britain and continental Europe.

But, given that the Heaney Irish Review is based on a memorial conference held at Queen's University last April, I feel the northern contributors respond to his work with special intensity.

For me something more is going on, some deeper comprehension, in the prose or poetry by (for instance) Carson, Patricia Craig, Anne Devlin, Leontia Flynn, John Wilson Foster, Alan Gillis, Peter McDonald, Medbh McGuckian and Sinéad Morrissey.

A third founding aim of the Irish Review was to be "critical". There was dissatisfaction with the often uncritical responses to Irish literature in other journals at home and abroad. Happily, the 50th issue does not drown criticism in celebration. Indeed, its critical thrust proves how thoroughly alive Seamus Heaney's poetry is. Alan Gillis writes: "A poetic legacy, surely, must be the result, not just of people being affected by a poet, but of people then going forth and making something happen in relation to that encounter . . . [and] it shouldn't be a betrayal to criticise . . . Heaney's legacy needs tough, informed, straight-talking debate and criticism, as well as praise and fond recitation. Let him be worth fighting over if only in our quarrel with ourselves."

Leontia Flynn admits to having quarrelled with Heaney’s aesthetic when she first read his poems. That renders all the more powerful her praise of him, and her endorsement of his “radically necessary” “defence of poetry” in times that tend to be uncritical again.

Attacking "a hectic, depthless relativism", Flynn quotes Heaney in Stepping Stones: "The main disadvantage of being a poet anywhere at the minute is that there is no strong sense of critical response which has lived and loved that which it is responding to."

Heaney personifies the fact that poetry still has some kind of holistic purchase in Ireland. And, if “Irish journals” survive, I hope they will retain their own holistic ambition rather than be absorbed into the academy and its internal debates.

Edna Longley is an emeritus professor of English at Queen's University Belfast. Her most recent book is Yeats and Modern Poetry (Cambridge, 2013)