Last week, my Irish lit-mag slog took me through the uplands and lowlands of nonfiction country, with its personal essays and activist journalism, its mixed-media photo-essays and longform critical badgerings. This week, we’re doing the fiction and the poetry. I might as well say at this point that I feel largely unqualified to judge contemporary poetry. If pushed, I work with a flexible axiom, to wit: I don’t know much about poetry, but I know what I like. You have been warned.
I’ll begin with The Stinging Fly, by now a grandparental presence on the Irish lit-mag scene. The Fly’s founding editor, Declan Meade, has now stepped backward or upward to oversee a miniature publishing empire, and the magazine proper is edited by the novelist Lisa McInerney (author of The Glorious Heresies). But the spirit of the mag feels consistent, which is to say that it continues to publish elusive, modernist-inflected short fiction that makes you laugh when it doesn’t make you scratch your head (and you could say the same about the poetry).
[ Lisa McInerney: ‘I’m a hoor for attention. It has to be good attention, though’Opens in new window ]
Highlights of the Winter 2024-25 issue include The Wrong Thing, a story about grief, shock, and consciousness itself by Keith Ridgway; a pleasantly meandering personal essay about a 2005 visit to Sudan by Eimear McBride; and a spooky, memorable story by a young writer appropriately named James Young, called Long Term Parking. This starts out like a chatty blog post about a Sopranos episode (Long Term Parking) and becomes something much deeper and darker by gradual strange degrees. Potent stuff. Also potent: a poem by Karl Parkinson called Don’t Want to Die, which would suffer in quotation; buy the issue, read the poem.
Banshee, founded in 2014 by Claire Hennessy, Eimear Ryan, and Laura Cassidy, appears twice a year. In spirit feminist and Irish (hence the name), Banshee nonetheless publishes ecumenically across all genders, and each issue contains a mixture of poetry and prose. Issue 18 (Autumn/Winter 2024) features an extract from Rosita Sweetman’s forthcoming memoir, which is wonderfully titled A Girl with a Fork in a World of Soup, and which, on the evidence of this extract, has an equally wonderful first line: “The first thing I remember is being in Mum’s womb.”
The Fall of Man: a Christmas short story by Donal Ryan
Kevin Power: Literary magazines are all the more vital for operating off the commercial grid
Caricature and the Irish: Satirical Prints from the Library of Trinity College, Dublin c 1780-1830
Eve in Ireland: Controlling and Silencing Irish Women, 1922-1972 by Ailish McFadden
[ Rosita Sweetman: As a wife and mother I learned feminism all overOpens in new window ]
Banshee Issue 18 also includes Memory Prompts, a personal essay by Ruby Eastwood about various visits to her father in Barcelona: “Remember that his carefulness is not just the carefulness of the very drunk, that he’s like this even in his brief moments of sobriety.” The “memory prompts” of the title are instructions composed on the Notes app of Eastwood’s phone, “a series of imperatives” – self commanding self, that is, to recall the vital details of this most vexed, and most personal, of relationships. It’s a powerful piece.
Ragaire, published out of Galway, is a newcomer; Issue 1 appeared this summer. A “ragaire”, the editors tell me, is someone who enjoys walking at night, when things look and feel secretive, different. The Ragaire vibe is one of disquiet; I like it. Issue 1 features both poetry and prose. Even Keel, a poem by Helen Campbell, is laid out like a right-angled triangle: “A/tiny/pill will/give you the/illusion of skimming/over the surface of life,” it begins, and ends with its longest line: “someday you will wake up to know that sailing is not a substitute for living.” Striking work.
Ragaire also includes Tepid, a five-page short story by Phoebe Santow about a young woman spending a college semester abroad in Dublin. That description might ring alarm bells (not another one!), but this strange, numb story, with its perfectly controlled paragraphs, generates real insight and a deep sense of unease. Last line: “My hands grip his back like a retreat into childhood.” That’s the good stuff.
The Four-Faced Liar is published out of Cork (but nobody’s perfect); it is a conspicuously beautiful object, a large-format magazine with photographs and artwork gorgeously printed. It offers a poetry and prose mix, or perhaps buffet is the word I’m looking for. The vibe is bouncy, funny, with underlying darkness.
Issue 2 contains a short story about grief by Conor Griffin, Too Good for Charity, which begins with the line, “In some ways I enjoyed the aftermath of my father’s death,” and only gets better from there. “In school I was the type […] who induced a sigh of relief from many a father when I showed up shy-eyed and strangling a wilting corsage to collect his daughter for the debs.” Jokes in fiction are a sign that the writer’s intelligence is operating in high gear. A joke that also beautifully reveals character? In the trade, we call that a twofer.
Also worth picking up a copy of The Four-Faced Liar for is a very short story called Unsent Application to Become a Foster Parent by Andrew Rucker Jones. This takes the form of increasingly long, increasingly funny, and increasingly heartbreaking responses to the questions posed by the eponymous application form. It stayed with me.
Flash fiction, like poetry, occupies a zone of literary achievement to which I am largely a stranger (look, we’re all philistines about something). Splonk, an online flash-fiction journal edited by the novelist Nuala O’Connor, therefore introduced me to what is, I think, essentially a non-narrative form, or perhaps a narrative halfway house between the prose poem (which no one has ever satisfactorily defined) and the vignette or sketch (also never satisfactorily defined).
Issue 12 of Splonk features The Questions by the splendidly named poet Partridge Boswell; its elusive and allusive paragraphs seem to be about a father speaking to a son, and its closing lines achieve a unique effect, not quite that of a conventional short story: “Life is so f**king long, my favourite professor told me at a back porch kegger after graduation. Tap in hand, I nodded and refilled his cup. I didn’t have the heart then to tell him what I don’t have to tell you now. He was wrong.”
Sinéad Creedon and Orla Murphy, Dublin-based writers and editors, have been publishing Sonder since 2019; they’re now up to Issue X, and Belfast-based writer Aisling Kearney has since joined the editorial squad. Each issue has a theme (Identity, Belonging, Madness); most issues also have a “featured writer.” Since the featured writer for the current edition, (theme: Need), is Kevin Power (sterling work, a name to watch), I’d better limit my remarks to Issue IX (theme: Madness), whose featured writer is the journalist, novelist and memoirist Sophie White; she contributes a funny, dark vignette about female bodies and death.
Sonder offers shoestring shelter to some extremely impressive work by younger writers. Issue IX contains two short pieces by Lea McCarthy, who (according to her bio note) studied Creative Writing at NUIG. I Believe in Something Something is about Knock airport (no, really); it recounts the vision of Mary beheld by Mary Byrne and Mary McLoughlin in 1879; it contains this sentence: “The Marys (the solid Marys) ran home and spread the gospel.” The solid Marys: deft, funny. Heads Up, Ladies, also by Lea McCarthy, is about an under-15s ladies’ Gaelic football team – their lives, their world: “This muddiness, this cold hard smack, this pitch with the wonky white lines and the nepotistic linesmen.” In two pages, it’s all there.
Shakily funded, sometimes shakily produced, lit mags are not just the staging area for the “real” (that is, moneymaking) literary culture. They are themselves a literary culture
Also worthy of mention, from Sonder Issue IX, is Alicia Bones’s short story, The City After Dark. A married office worker surreally parts company with his own life across a single evening. Like a sour Murakami, or the earlier novels of Ottessa Moshfegh: “She pushes me into an empty room. ‘My mother forgot my birthday today, you s**t.’ I can relate.”
The Pig’s Back, edited by Dean Fee and Emily Cooper (both also writers), is published out of Letterkenny; it’s “a literary prose journal that aims to bring the rest of Ireland – and in turn, the world – to the northwest”. I didn’t, alas, receive a hard copy of the latest issue, but the website presents some excellent work. Direct Message, a short story by Grace Banks, is about a young queer woman, Mia, who can’t get over her ex, and who manipulates the rules of social media (and of social actuality) to perpetrate a kind of revenge.
Another relative newcomer is Profiles, a Dublin literary and visual arts journal edited by Clare Healy & Sarah Sturzel. On the evidence of issue iii, Profiles is the real deal: the art and design are spectacular, and the fiction is unusually good. Loss Adjustment by Dara Higgins, about a middle-aged man who quits his job to write poetry and can’t, might be the best short story I encountered in any of these journals: hilarious, empathetic, stylish. Irish Carnage?: Essays on Political Violence by Chris Beausang is an unnerving bit of modernism, in the form of an academic book review that is also a memoir and an essay on, of course, political violence.
Southword, edited by Patrick Cotter and Billy O’Callaghan and published by the Munster Literature Centre, is another venerable presence on the lit mag scene. It publishes both poetry and prose. Issue 47 features Vigilante, a short story by Karen Jennings. A female academic moves house after a break-up; little happens, until you realise the story is about “material culture,” which is both the academic’s field of study and the physical basis of emotion in our lives. Also an excellent poem, Tigers by Jonathan Edwards, about zoos, animals, us.
So, that’s that. What have I learned? Everyone who thrives on the literary scene agrees that we need a thriving literary scene. But the real question is, why? What are lit mags for? They are not, surely, just a greenhouse for new writers who will later be ground up by the Big Five commercial-publishing agribusiness machine. Shakily funded, sometimes shakily produced, lit mags are not just the staging area for the “real” (that is, moneymaking) literary culture. They are themselves a literary culture, all the more vital (and vital, here, means both “necessary” and “alive”) for operating off the commercial grid.
Oh, sure, they’re a counterculture, the house journals of a priestly and passionate underground. Hardly anyone reads them, measured by head of population. But that’s the good news. When most people aren’t paying attention, you never know what you might get away with.
Kevin Power is an assistant professor of English at Trinity College Dublin. His books include Bad Day in Blackrock, White City and The Written World: Essays and Reviews.
