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.
About the Author
 Eamonn
Wall was born in Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford, in 1955.
He has lived in Nebraska since 1992 where he was associate
professor of English at Creighton University. He is the
newly appointed Jefferson Smurfit Professor of Irish Studies
at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. His previous collections
of poetry, Dyckman 200th Street and Iron
Mountain Road were both also published by Salmon.
Photograph:
Eric Luke, The Irish Times
Some
Poems from The
Crosses
The
Crosses
We
were driving back to Denver from
Don Martinez's funeral on an April day
under the clearest of skies,
the brightest of light.
Nights
he read On the Road under lamplight
maps flattened under cold stars on lands
which could never know compromise,
whose quiet men towed his truck to
gas stations: full of dust. They could never register
Don Martinez's cadence, the soft lines of his face.
We
sat together three of us on worn recliners,
drinking red wine on the porch,
under the western sky & above the boom-and-
bust Denver you despised. You watched
distant planes, flying low, lit for landing.
Your heroes: Janis Joplin, Joe Di Maggio.
Your worn face, impassive as cedar.
You
underlined for me the desolation
of these highways: the mockery of
place names among great continuities:
rising to dryland, descending onto grass.
I was anxious to count the mugs on the
blue counter beside the sink, Marie's foot
hard on the pedal, passing faded shadings
of the Wild West, Wilco on the radio.
For
Marie you came to Denver. From our bed
I heard your breaths from under jazz on the
radio station, as mellow late-night as your bodies,
as snow falling on parked cars on Decatur St.
Lightly touching my hands, Marie returned at
daylight, around us the blankets settling peacefully.
Under
the crosses, you have joined the dry
ground. You passed time over reds & coffee
with waitresses as you crossed this earth
from Cody to Las Cruces slowed down by the
quiet humiliations of migrant life: gas station oil
changes in Pueblo, arrest in Walsenburg for
disorderly conduct, trumped up charge &
hefty fine. Desperate in East Texas, you beat time
with your sister on slot machines, her husband
working an Amoco rig on the Gulf of Mexico.
We
were driving back to Denver from
Don Martinez's funeral on an April day
under the clearest of skies,
the brightest of light. Under the crosses
he has joined the dry ground.
Nebraska/Christmas
Eve
Greetings.
The Platte River crawls across yellow prairie
under concrete bridges to meet the brown Missouri.
Rolling darkly down from kingdoms we know as
South Dakota, Montana.
Greeted
by neon towns where children are held in sleep
by crimson horizons at the end of the world, where
parents as they curl confirm majestic interiors of
sorghum and corn, at the end of the day.
Greetings.
Rivers on great journeys, our plates of food
and sleep. We break bread under great skies. Our red
faces know so deeply our mothers’ feet walking on
landings, like pouring water over stone. A summer
evening when we sat on rocks to await the
passing of the evening train.
Greetings
for this season. It is snowing heavily under a
quarter moon so shingle and land groan, contentedly.
Under the tree, presents are wrapped in red. The bows
are white. As time rolls with the tree limbs, we arrive
at the continent’s door.
We
have greeted the stranger. He sat hands wrapped
around coffee cup before our open fire. The woman
of this house and her children are sleeping. The man
has cleaned the kitchen surfaces of crumbs and has
confronted the clever spaces of the dishwasher,
with his cups and glasses.
Hard
to tell at this late hour the heart's direction,
Nebraska. A summer evening when we sat on
rocks to await the passing of the evening train.
The river moving because it can't be still, the man
greeting a white towel with his mother's hands.
The
Road
To
begin again
after
travelling
the
white car
outside
the motel
to
have to
again
have faith enough
to
pull
one door firmly
then walk away.
(Copyright
Eamonn Wall 2000. All Rights Reserved.)
PRAISE
FOR EAMONN WALL
Dyckman--200th Street
"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
Iron
Mountain Road
"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. Copyright © 1996, Boston
Review. All rights reserved.
Learning to forget
Poet
and critic Eamonn Wall left a recession logged Ireland in
the 1980s. Now he writes about it through the prism of 15
years in the US. He talks to Katie Donovan in The
Irish Times
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