It is almost nineteen years since Liam Miller of The Dolmen Press and the poet James Liddy came to me and asked me if I would edit a magazine called POETRY IRELAND, a title first coined by David Marcus in April 1948 then co-editor with Terence Smith of IRISH WRITING. David produced nineteen numbers of his POETRY IRELAND, and then seven reduced numbers as supplements to IRISH WRITING, making twenty-six numbers in all. His successor as editor of IRISH WRITING, Sean J. White, produced two POETRY IRELAND supplements, the last being in 1956.

So then in September 1962, with the assistance of James Liddy, James J. McAuley and Richard Weber, I produced the first issue of a new POETRY IRELAND; of the contributors Austin Clarke, Patrick Kavanagh, Donagh MacDonagh and Leslie Daiken are dead. But I find to my gratification that from that first issue and the five that followed (the last being a double issue edited by John Montague from material assembled by me) the following appear in this first issue of THE POETRY IRELAND REVIEW: without conscious planning by me: Seamus Heaney, Macdara Woods, Leland Bardwell, James Liddy, Paul Durcan, Lorna Reynolds, Monk Gibbon, Kevin Faller, John Montague, Michael Hartnett (but now in his departure from English, Mícheál 0 hAirtneide) and speaking to us from the grave as it were, the late Austin Clarke - eleven in all. Of the remaining thirteen contributors some I had never even heard of when that last issue of POETRY IRELAND appeared with the date Spring 1968 (in effect it should have appeared in Autumn 1966 at the latest but that was mainly my fault since just before then I left the country).

Whatever, the presence of that eleven from what seems so very long ago gives to THE POETRY IRELAND REVIEW (the brain-child of John F. Deane who came to me as had Liam Miller and James Liddy in 1962) a kind of tenuous continuity with POETRY IRELAND: that and Ruth Brandt's fabulous bird.

POETRY IRELAND under my editorship did not publish verse in Irish nor did it publish reviews; THE POETRY IRELAND REVIEW, in the term of my editorship will consider verse in Irish and will publish reviews although there are none in this issue. It will also welcome translations from any language. As for myself, my taste in verse is catholic and although the years cannot but have rubbed off on me certain predispositions, I think I know where I'm going.