About
Editors: Leland Bardwell, Pearse Hutchinson,
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Macdara Woods
Administrator: Áinín Ní Bhroin
Cyphers was founded in 1975. Three of the editors had been waiting for the return of the fourth, Pearse Hutchinson, from Leeds University, where he had been Gregory Fellow for three years. Before he left, all four had been concerned in running a weekly poetry reading in a pub, Sinnotts of South King Street. Exhaustion, the financial crisis of the 1970s with the consequent rise in the price of drink, and severe competition from the noisy cash register in the pub, had put an end to that venture.
Other Irish magazines had recently ceased publication, and the time seemed right to start a new one. We decided we would pay contributors, publish poems from all the countries where we had contacts, and try to keep the price down. The Arts Council gave us 50% of what we needed for the first two issues (the balance made up by contributions from John Buckley of Poughkeepsie, Benedict Ryan of Mayo, and Katherine Kavanagh of Dublin who also taught one of us book-keeping). From Issue 3 onwards the Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon has enabled us to keep going.
About The Editors:
LELAND BARDWELL was born in India, grew up in Leixlip, Co Kildare and was educated in Dublin and London. As a fiction writer she has published five novels, the most recent being Mother to a Stranger (2002), as well as a volume of short stories, Different Kinds of Love (1986). In 2006 the Dedalus Press published her latest collection of poems, The Noise of Masonry Settling. Leland Bardwell’s poetry is witty, full of sharp, intimate honesty, and of truth and surprises. Her autobiography, A Restless Life, was published in 2008 by Liberties Press.
Born in Glasgow, raised in Dublin, PEARSE HUTCHINSON is a writer and translator in both English and Irish who has been publishing since 1945. His The Soul That Kissed the Body (Selected Poems in Irish with translations into English, 1990), Collected Poems (2002) and Done Into English (collected translations, 2003), show his humane imagination, his range and his knowledge of the literatures of Europe and Ireland. His latest collection of poems, At Least for a While, appeared in 2008 from Gallery Press.
EILÉAN NÍ CHUILLEANÁIN was born in Cork City in 1942. She has published eight books of poetry, most recently The Girl Who Married the Reindeer (2001) and Selected Poems (2008). She is a Fellow and Associate Professor of English at Trinity College, Dublin. She has translated from Irish, Italian and Romanian, most recently After the Raising of Lazarus from the Romanian of Ileana Mãlãncioiu. She has been accused of an ‘eerie blend of the legendary and modern [which] sounds utterly natural’.
Born and educated in Dublin, MACDARA WOODS has travelled widely, in North America, Europe, Russia and North Africa; he lived in London for a time in the sixties and early seventies, and has read his poems from San Francisco to Moscow. He has published sixteen books with New Writers’ Press, Gallery Press and Dedalus Press, and others, the latest Artichoke Wine (Dedalus, 2006). He can convey, in the ordinary urban districts of Dublin or in Umbria Co. Mayo, the plain strangeness of all – not just human – life. His most recent work, Fifteen Contacts, is a series of poems published online to celebrate the people and landscape of Clare Island, Co. Mayo: www.thistimethisplace.com.