Nótaí na nEagarthóirí: Editor’s Notes David Gardiner Bob Dylan, Minnesota’s sometime favorite son, wrote “Blind Willie McTell” in 1983. Had he put this song on Infidels, music as we know it may have packed itself up, handed over the award, and stopped. Given the rabid rights management of the Dylan estate, I cannot quote a single full line from the song for fear of New Hibernia Review being sued to two inches less than its life. Still, it seems we have all been staring out windows of our own St. James Hotels. When Dylan wrote that song in Red Wing, Minnesota, he reflected on isolation, a condemned land, racism, the presence or absence of God, and (toward which those all lead) the blues. Evident in the writings we have gathered from all over the globe in recent months, those same themes provide a common bass note. This, our summer issue, seems to be the issue for the “summer that wasn’t.” In that vein, Boris Pasternak’s The Last Summer provides a melancholy, though not the same sort of isolation that some of us have felt, especially in some places in the United States. He looks backward, like Stefan Zweig, to earlier European times—a myth of romance and class harmony and love. We know that those times were no “summer of love,” but at the moment it seems that perhaps those gods have been slain. Hopefully not. And hopefully you’ll indulge us as we introduce the present volume. Another European author well attuned to Pasternak and Zweig, Gaston Bachelard wrote in The Poetics of Space (1958), his groundbreaking study of our interiors and how we encounter them, “our house is the corner of our world.” He continued: “the house shelters the daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.” Obviously, Bachelard did not have twenty-four-hour news networks. Snide comments aside, the house has provided these things for all of us, sometimes lately in spite of ourselves. Since the beginning of this year, we have often heard that “we are all in this together.” That is only partly true. We are all individuals. Our physical positions are amazingly similar. We have all, at some point, been staring out windows. Rather than “we are all in this together,” “we are all alone together” might be more appropriate. [End Page 5] Not only does that phrasing mirror the human condition of radical selfness—we are, after all, the center of every experience that we have—but it unites us in a very different way. New Hibernia Review ’s contributors come from all over the world. All over the world each one of us, at one point or another, has stared out the window at our environs. The view is different from each place, but each of us stands in the same position. About the cover piece, Harry Clarke’s frontispiece for Origin of John Jameson Whiskey: Containing Some Interesting Observations Thereon Together with the Causes of Its Present Scarcity (1924), Angela Griffith has written: “a single figure stands defiantly on deck, neck scarf flying in the wind, resolved to meet journey’s end. The monumentality of the scene is belied by the delicacy of its rendering.” Beneath the ship, the viewer will note a surprisingly benevolent force of nature. Defiance, delicacy, and providence seem to be combined in our summer issue, as we hope they are in all of our readers’ lives. Vincent van Gogh, well acquainted with this triumvirate, told us long ago that “it is indeed worthwhile to devote one’s life to the task of expressing the poetry.” We hope that you experience the poetry of dance, cinema, literature, spirituality, history, and music that has been gathered in this issue. We are again pleased to offer a wide mixture of works in Irish studies. First is the appropriately titled “A Door Opening.” We then dance in Australia, watch The Informer through many lenses, dive into the gothic, enjoy an important new series of poems, explore charity during a forgotten famine, make sense of the Pogues (which is quite a task), and, referring back to Dylan, focus...