PERIODICAL: JOSEPH WOODSreviews Cork Literary Review 2009Edited by Eugene O'Connell 257pp, €20
THE EXISTENCE of literary journals is often precarious. Apart from the labour-of- love aspect, there are the crippling production costs and, sometimes, the lack of committed subscribers. Many journals disappear or at best go online – witness Southword, the journal of the Munster Literature Centre which recently went virtual. Cork Literary Review,now in its 13th issue, under the editorship of Eugene O'Connell, is reversing matters and has just gone from paperback to hardback in a bold and ambitious move.
O'Connell is both an artful editor and a significant contributor throughout. He turns the tables on Dennis O'Driscoll and deftly conducts a mini Stepping Stonesinterview with the poet, which covers much ground, from his photographic recall of his childhood in Thurles to influences in poetry, contemporary critical voices he trusts, spirituality and full and frank disclosures on sport.
In another essay O'Connell addresses the topography of Bernard O'Donoghue's poetry, and notes how the landscape (and he gives specific examples) of northwest Cork was an open-air laboratory for O'Donoghue's studies as a medievalist and consequently for his subject matter as poet, an influence, O'Connell notes, that "seeps seamlessly into a poetry that filters a 21st-century sensibility through a medieval mindset". Republished here is the quietly devastating poem Hermes, along with a review of O'Donoghue's Selected Poemsby Maurice Harmon. Similar attention is given to Pat Cotter's first collection, Perplexed Skin, and more recent poems.
But at the heart of a good journal are its various linkages and happy coincidences, from Matthew Sweeney's Study in Yellow with Poodles of Paristo Michael Coady's poem and accompanying photo of Paul Durcan in Montmarte cemetery. Durcan appears again with his poem The Rule of Marie Foley, accompanied by a fine series of black-and-white plates of the artist's work in ceramics and multimedia, an essay on her indebtedness to Rilke and a further poem dedicated to her by Kerry Hardie.
The connection with poetry and visual art doesn't end there. Elizabeth McDonald in her essay Journeys of the Imaginationtakes us on a journey from "the oriental sapphire blue" of the opening of the Purgatorioto Mario Luzi's pronouncement on the colour of poetry being "turquoise-blue", the colour of hills after a storm. The thread is continued with Richard Tillinghast's poem Two Blues, celebrating Winslow Homer and Canaletto, while Gerard Smyth in Blue Crucifixionconsiders Gauguin and Poussin in a poem in part dedicated to Hughie O'Donoghue. An essay by James Harpur goes much deeper than its subtitle, Some Musing on Poetry and Painting, suggests, and is full of fresh and original thinking on an ancient comparison.
And it's not all poetry. There are essays here by William Wall and Maureen Gallagher considering the writing of fiction and the philosophy of art, respectively; Vincent McDowell makes a welcome reappearance for this reader in his short story Lemon Creams, a study of a cruel father-and-son relationship and the shift of power or humanity when the son nurses the parent in his last days.
As well as McDonald's translations of Luzi, more locally Malachi McCormick tackles Lament for Art O'Leary, a new rendition from a local oral version of the Caoineadh, and Gerry Murphy breaks new ground with a series of versions from The Illiad. This issue is full to brim of many fine stand-alone poems; space does not permit a roll call, but it's good to see among the established names a selection of work by three emerging poets, Shirley McClure, Judy Russell, and Mary Madec, finalists in the Bradshaw Books Manuscript Competition. There is much to be recommended within all 257 pages of Cork Literary Review 2009, now in its more permanent hardback phase.
Joseph Woods is a poet and director of Poetry Ireland