The Crosses
Copyright © 2000
by Eamonn Wall
Salmon Publishing
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The Crosses is a striking metaphor which embraces many of the themes that Eamonn Wall explores in his third
collection. He takes stock of what we lose and gain as we negotiate paths through an unstable world. Here is a work of
mature affirmation which celebrates the deep bonds which bind us to land, water, and the streets of the present and past.
With verve and wit, Wall deftly crosses and re-draws the boundaries of the contemporary Irish and American worlds.
— from the publisher
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Dyckman-200th Street
Copyright © 1993
by Eamonn Wall
Salmon Publishing
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Eamonn Wall is writing from the nerve centre of the universe in
his poems from America. Even an early poem such as the
enchanting "Song at Lake Michigan" written shortly after
arrival in Milwaukee in 1982 bears this out: "But here I can sing
myself / unbound by traditions of death." ... Ambling around his
hometown, Wall reminds himself that he took the right step by
leaving: "You feared you would never see this place again. Here
it is. It is nothing," he writes dispassionately, adding later "I walk
through this town square untempted by its landscape." Nevertheless,
it is the Ireland of Wall's childhood and adolescence that is
most recalled in the book, in mischievously elegiac poems such as
"Flight" and "The Country Doctor." However, despite the
celebratory strand, Wall does not shirk from the harsh realities that
face immigrants in America. By no means could he be said to cosy
up to the place:
At night we go home to break our bread.
Our doors are bolted to America.
Our dreams fastened to no promised land. ("Immigrants") — Paddy
Kehoe, RTE Guide
Over the last decade or so, what has become known rather flamboyantly as the
"Irish Renaissance" has brought forward a new generation of artists and
writers in a variety of fields who have a no-apologies take on their origins,
and whose work has brought a new image to Ireland internationally. ... Wall's
urban bustle conveys the fast-paced ironies and charms of New York City,
where he lived for many years while teaching there. But while the diversities
of the American experience can be seen in [his] work, it is important that
Ireland is ever presnt, in memory and in brilliant images. — Irish Echo
Eamonn Wall's masterpiece is a good product and it is aimed, not just
at readers in this country, but at readers in Britain and the United
States as well. ... Eamonn Wall has been described by Philip Casey as
"Enniscorthy's own poet." Let the Enniscorthy people adopt his work
and regard him as "the" town poet! Locals should purchase Eamonn
Wall's fine book and read first hand his description of local people and
events. In his work "My Book of Genesis" the prose is simply magic.
"Let there be a red-bricked post office to tell the time, and a red-bricked
nuthouse where the mad may play." ... Dyckman-200th Street
is a brilliant collection of poems written by the genial Enniscorthy-man
who holds the responsibility of Professor of English at Creighton
University by day. — The Irish Echo
In these extraordinary poems the exile tradition is rejuvenated, given a sharp, current edge. This book marks a significant
crosscurrent in contemporary Irish/American literature. — Jack Morgan, Irish Literary Supplement
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From the Sin-é Café to the Black Hills:
Notes on the New Irish
Copyright © 1999
by Eamonn Wall
U of Wisconsin P
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Throughout history, writings by those of Irish dscent frequently have revealed the
meaningfulness of identity and landscape, and these two concerns are also of
critical importance to Eamonn Wall. But what stands out about Wall's latest work,
From the Sin-é Café to the Black Hills: Notes on the New Irish,
is the extent to which the author is willing to explore with (and without) personal ease the
complexities of what it means to be Irish in a contemporary climate of international
translocation. — Irish Literary Supplement
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Iron Mountain Road
Copyright © 1997
by Eamonn Wall
Salmon Publishing
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Iron
Mountain Road follows Dyckman-200th Street (Salmon, 1994),
Eamonn Wall's widely praised first book. Here is a collection which
chronicles the process of migration--from the bustle, high buildings,
and close living of New York City to the empty wide open spaces,
and often desolate but magnificent American prairie and high plains.
This is an innovative book which describes aspects of the Irish immigrant
experience which has been hitherto ignored. Wall explores and describes
the physical and human landscapes he encounters, while remaining open
to the ironies presented by the journey. The Platte River in Nebraska and
the Black Hills of South Dakota are brought brilliantly to life by a
consciousness formed in County Wexford and New York, and it is
often to these starting points that Wall turns to for confirmation.
Other important concerns are history, parenthood, and the sea.
Eamonn Wall is a leading poetic voice among the
"New Irish" writers
living in the United States who describes the emigrant
experience with
great honesty and by using innovative forms.
Features of the Iron
Mountain Road are the long lines and prose
poems which are employed to
great effect to describe the enormous space the
poet encounters, and
which also facilitate Wall's desire to write a poetry
laden with the deep
rhythms of ordinary life. Iron
Mountain Road is a moving and brilliant collection
which confirms Eamonn Wall as a daring and original poet
and as spokesman for frequently marginalized, but never
silent exiles. Wall gives eloquent voice to a lost
generation — the exiles of the 1980s and 1990s. ... This
is a brilliant, insightful second collection which
confirms Eamonn Wall's stature as a daring and original
poet, spokesman for a frequently marginalized, but
never silent, constituency of exiles. — from the jacket
Eamonn Wall showed his promise in Dyckman-200th Street,
his Irish version of the poet in New York. Now he delivers the goods in
Iron Mountain Road, a journey from rural Ireland to New York City to the
heartland of America. ... With
this new collection of poetry Eamonn Wall is proving hismelf to be one of the best
poets, Irish or American, writing in American — or for that matter, Ireland--today. Read
him if you love the West, whether it be the coast of Ireland or the mythic land where
cowboys and Indians roamed. This is one of the best books of poetry to be published in
1997. — i>Irish Echo, October 22-28, 1997
It's a book about dislocation, not exile. ... He has a cinematographer's eye,
and it's not an American eye so much as a Wim Wenders' eye....He's managed
to take in the mythology of the States, and it's blessedly free of nostalgia,
the too easy trip back home. He's able to find the connection between the old
world and the new. ... a good, muscular, adult book. Wall has found his
stride. — "Poetry Now," RTÉ Radio
His poems are charged with a thoroughly contemporary and a profoundly literary awareness of what it means to be Irish,
and a writer, in America. — Kathleen McCracken, Poetry Ireland Review
In his second book, Wall's wry imagination bears witness to his astonishing ability to absorb what William Carlos Williams
called "the American grain" without losing the intonations of his own idiom. Such double vision, or double-speak, defines
the situation of the emigrant writer, and of this group Wall is among the best. An Irish poet living in America, he is
equally adept at evoking the teeming cityscape of New York, the vast spaces of the American prairie, and the lush
countryside of his native Wexford. Louis Simpson observed that American poetry must have a stomach that can "digest
rubber, coal, uranium, moons, poems." Wall's work has already digested Hart Crane's Bridge, Omaha, Mount Rushmore,
Lake Michigan and a good deal of junk food. These new poems reveal him as a daring and original poet with an interest
in exploring how the surfaces of the present open windows into history. — The Boston Review
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Refuge at Desoto Bend
Copyright © 2004
by Eamonn Wall
Salmon Publishing
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One of the many striking themes in this collection, and in much of Eamonn Wall's acclaimed work, is migration and the
search for material and emotional shelter and refuge in unfamiliar locations. In "The Wexford Container Tragedy," both
refugees and locals grieve and seek to come to terms with a new world born out of tragedy. Eamonn Wall, himself an
emigrant, recasts the Irish experience of emigration in the light of a new phenomenon: emigration to Ireland. —
from the publisher
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