Iron Mountain Road is Eamonn Wall's second collection of poetry, following Dyckman - - 200 Street (Salmon, 1994), 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.  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. 

Features of 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.
 

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 most recent collection of poetry is The Crosses, published in 2000.

Photograph: Eric Luke, The Irish Times
 
 

A Poem from
Iron Mountain Road
by EAMONN WALL

Victoria, British Columbia

Green, dogwood trees, gnarled oaks 
driftwood at Oak Bay.  I am far 
north in winter again where daylight 
swiftly evaporates, where morning is 
as sodden as the Parliament grass. 
I have come to an outpost of empire 
to encounter familiar separations 
and eat familiar dishes.  I remember 
your long fingers like sticks in the 
stones, your children asleep, my first 
view of the Pacific in Mexico when we 
lay exhausted and full of songs: 
how this ocean makes me want to weep. 
I think of the hard air of the prairie 
which lurks in each winter maple & 
the brilliant light of early morning. 
I am soft-skinned, broken-kneed 
oar-buried, man-of-war, Irish. 

(Copyright Eamonn Wall 1996)
 

PRAISE FOR IRON MOUNTAIN ROAD
The Boston 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. 
Copyright © 1996, Boston Review. All rights reserved.

"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

Dyckman--200th Street, Eamonn Wall's first collection
"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

(You can remove it later if you change your mind!)

Other Salmon books by EAMONN WALL

Dyckman-200th Street (Salmon Poetry, 1994)

The Crosses (Salmon Poetry, 2000)

Refuge at DeSoto Bend (Salmon Poetry, 2004)

A Tour of Your Country (Salmon Poetry, 2008)