Books by Eamonn Wall:
 
 

THE CROSSES 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. The Crosses by Eamonn Wall Price: £6.99/$12.00 84 pages

IRON MOUNTAIN ROAD Iron Mountain Road follows Dyckman - - 200 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.  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.  Iron Mountain Road by Eamonn Wall Price £6.99 / $12.00 96 pages

 

Praise for Eamonn Wall's Poetry:

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. 
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