Anthology:Irish literary culture has been fortunate with the quality and the liveliness of its journals. For one, witness the abrasive energy of The Bell, a forum for creative dissent and intellectual diversity throughout the 1940s and 1950s, at a time when, as Sean O'Faolain declared, "The really terrible threat to Ireland is an intellectual one", writes Eibhear Walshe
Many other literary journals, before and after, also battled against this threat and, with many of these battles won, the contemporary Irish journal now has the freedom for all kinds of imaginative experiment.
The Dublin Review was founded in 2000 by New York-born Brendan Barrington because, in his own words, "It seemed to me an odd state of affairs, in the late 1990s, that there was no general literary periodical in Ireland publishing short fiction and substantial non-fiction pieces . . .".
Seven years later and with 28 numbers of the journal published, the distinctive, readable quality of the typical Dublin Review essay is confirmed by the publication of this anthology of selected writings. The valuable creative freedom for the essayist is the freedom to work within several genres at the same time - memoir, cultural history, review, travel writing, always redefining what makes a piece of writing important or noteworthy.
Barrington, who made this selection of 26 essays himself, ventures a definition of the form of the literary essay: "But if forced to articulate a governing idea behind the magazine, I might offer this: that the essay in its various guises is every bit as much an art form as the short story or the poem, and ought to be treated as such".
MANY OF THE essays come from Ireland's most influential writers, Seamus Heaney, Anne Enright, Glenn Patterson, John Banville, Angela Bourke, Colm Tóibín and others. However the collection also introduces other voices from outside Ireland with great success, in particular poet Kathleen Jamie's thoughtful and clear-sighted meditation on the responsibilities of middle age, Sabbath, or Michael Hoffmann's account of translating Joseph Roth, which makes you want read Roth again. Derek Mahon's account of his own intellectual and poetic apprenticeship, a wonderfully entertaining essay called Yeats and the Lights of Dublin, would, I think, have made an excellent starting point for the collection. Mahon's essay has such gems as, "Irony is a feature attributed to liberal Ulster Protestants generally, the tone having been set by McNiece, as if to absolve us of responsibility for our reprehensible heritage: one might write a love poem, or a plea for the wretched of the earth, and someone would say 'Oh, he's a liberal Unionist Protestant, He's being ironical'."
Another kind of apprenticeship is described in Colm Tóibín's memoir essay Barcelona 1975, an account of his first year away from Ireland. This honest, tender account of his first sexual experiences and of the gradual discovery of the precise, unspoken rules around sex is one of Tóibín's most impressive moments in prose. Roy Foster's The Red and The Green, is somewhat different from the other essays in the collection in that it is a lengthy and considered review of Ken Loach's film The Wind that Shakes the Barley but what marks the essay out is the energy of Foster's fundamental disagreement with Loach's interpretation of Irish history - "Given the current state of our own polities, north and south, and the credibility of our politicians, the Irish public's favourable reaction to Loach's representation of 1920-21 as an aborted socialist-nationalist revolution craving completion may be significant. But what they have been watching is an exercise in wish-fulfilment rather than history".
I was glad to see Catriona Crowe's essay The View from Street Level anthologised here, an essay I admired when it was first published, an account of the writings of urban visionary, the late Jane Jacob, interspersed with Crowe's own insightful portraits of Dublin street life. One of the strongest values in a piece of writing is the moment when it impacts, unexpectedly, on your imagination and I always remember this essay when I pass by the shops on Aungier Street.
Crowe quotes Maeve Brennan at the opening of her essay and the evocation is apt, a connection acknowledged between two literary journals and two gifted observers of streetscapes. When Sean O'Faolain founded The Bell in 1940 he called for the journal to provide "A vivid awareness of what we are doing, what we are becoming, what we are". The Dublin Review, by the evidence of these 26 essays, gives us a vivid awareness of what we are becoming in the 21st century.
Eibhear Walshe is a lecturer in the Department of English, University College Cork. His biography Kate O'Brien: A Writing Life was published by Irish Academic Press in 2006
An insightful collection of essays by some of Ireland's most influential writers The Dublin Review Reader Edited by Brendan Barrington Dublin Review Books, 341pp. €20