A collection of essays has just been published in honour of for Denis Donoghue, Emeritus Professor of English at NYU and perhaps the most distinguished living Irish critic - affectionately identified by Colin Graham with the breed of intellectual dinosaurs that roamed the academic world before the theory meteor struck. Equally, he is one of those who have offered the most stalworth resistance to the new dispensation of somewhat android intellectuals who maraude academia under the banners of poststructuralism. The festschrift is edited by Brian Caraher and Robert Mahony of QUB and CUA Washington under the title of Ireland and Transatlantic Poetics (Delaware UP 2007).

Its chapters include a brilliant keynote address by Colm Tóibín along with essays by Mary Shine Thompson (‘From Donovan to Donoghue’), Colin Graham (‘What Stalks Through Donoghue’s Irish Criticism’), Matthew Campbell (‘Figuring Irish Poetry’), Warwick Gould (‘Yeats, Bibliographical Opportunity and the Life of the Text’), Nicholas Allen (‘Absurdity, Extravagance and Irish Modernism’), John P. Harrington (‘Irish Players and American Reviewers’), Frank Kermode (‘Getting it Wrong’), and others such as Christopher Berchild, Michael Malouf, Mary McGlynn, and the present writer. Donoghue’s magesterial essay ‘Joyce, Leavis and the Revolution of the Word’ is also included.

Still with Trinity College, Terence Brown (Dowden Professor of English) has been made the deserving subject of a festschrift entitled The Island that Was Never Found - presumably the island that we all inhabit in body or imagination. In spite of some exertion, the Ricorso page devoted to this scholar-critic fails to do justice to the scope of his attainments which include several of the most significant works of commentary published in Irish studies at any time including notably his study of Poets from Ulster (1975), his Social and Cultural History (1981 - updated to the millenium in 2004), his Selected Essays (1988), and his Critical Life of W. B. Yeats (1999).

Alongside those bookish achievements he is the long-standing chair of the Royal Irish Academy’s Committee for Anglo-Irish Literature and an adviser to numerous bodies including, it appears, the Legislative Assembly of Northern Ireland - in which connection his obiter dictum on the divided communities of Ireland in 1996 must have special interest where he speaks of ‘the tragic conflict of legitimate interests which had generated the recent conflict in their native land, which but for the catastrophic events in the greater European theatre might have resulted in an Irish civil war between the forces of Nationalism and unionism.’

Nicholas Allen and Eve Patten have edited the collection for Four Courts Press. It includes essays and poems by John Wilson Foster, Paul Muldoon, Chris Morash, Brendan Kennelly, Nicholas Grene, R. F. Foster, Derek Mahon, Greg Delanty, Declan Kiberd, Sighle Breathnach-Lynch, Gerald Dawe, Edna Longley, Helen Vendler and Seamus Heaney - in other words, virtually everybody who shares his degree of stature and elevation in Irish literary studies today. The table of contents is on his page in Ricorso [infra].