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THE STINGING FLY is a beautifully produced magazine from Dublin, offering a well balanced selection of poetry, short fiction and reviews, with beautiful black and white artwork throughout from Marta Wakula. Although the contributors come from many countries, there is a definite preponderance of Irish writers, ranging from the first time published to the very well known.

My favourite of the short stories is Mary O'Donoghue's THE TEAM OF ALIENATION. Having been a teacher myself, I could relate to Martin — his disappointment in the majority of his students, his enjoyment of the best young woman in the class keeping him on his toes and his awe when he marks a perfect exam paper. As a writer I related to Irene, his partner as she considers giving up teaching to try to write a novel. Her struggle with this puts a lot of strain onto the relationship, though Martin does his best to be understanding. At the same time O'Donoghue examines literature (especially the poetry of Thomas Kinsella, who features in the exam paper in the year of the story), literary criticism and the nature of education. Its an interesting and moving story.

There is plenty of quality poetry in this issue too. Toby Litt gives us three poems about cows, their digestive systems and their place in the ecology of things. In part 1 of COWS, he gives us the wonderful description:

						Cows
		have little smiles riding over their mouths,
	and their eyes are just too too humanly delicate.
		To picture their eyelashes in strict proportion
	is to cartoon them.

		Though cows have no idea what being drawn is
	I know they know they are being drawn — 
		this is an exceptional form of human attention,
	it doesn't involve touching, milk, measurement or pain,
		and it makes any normal heifer go decorous,

There are also a couple of beautiful poems from Marge Piercy (better known perhaps as a novelist?). DEADLOCKED WEDLOCK considers the nature of love and the social construction of 'acceptable' relationships:

	People loved as they would and must

	and the rivers still ran clean and the grass 
	grew a lot harder and more abundantly 
	than it does with us. What damage
	does love do in the soft grey evenings
	when the rain drifts like pigeon feathers
	across the sky and into the trees?

	Why gentlemen, do you fear two women
	who walk holding hands with their child?

This issue of THE STINGING FLY also features a selection of poems in translation from the Cork 2005 Translation Series, organised by Munster Literature Centre as part of the official programme for Cork 2005 European Capital of Culture. This offers an interesting introduction to a number of European poets writing in a variety of languages. The translations work as poems in their own right, though the reader cannot make comparison to the original. For me, the most striking of these poems was Guntar Godins' CHA CHA:

	When I was at my most beautiful
	Our street in Riga was shelled,

THE STINGING FLY offers an excellent snapshot of the literature scene in Ireland and beyond.