Hearing the Ambassador Speak

Understated weight of evening,
the columns of the university's
recital hall lit to blooming beige,
bunting and drapes are shaking,
slightly so, symmetrical and fair.
Patterned to the seats on which
we fret: Please, Ms. Ambassador,
don't mention our president by
name or frame your thoughts to
wind them down, or up, to the
Iraq War. What a thing of beauty
Helsinki is in this May air, the blue
and yellow buildings that whisper
love and books and Martin Luther,
not him again, as wandering way-
wardly from Unioninkatu to the
train station, I stop to pass
an hour with students gathered
on Esplanade Park, their heroes
Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and
Kurt Cobain. To the first I pass
from my blue jeans pocket
Lunch Poems by Frank O'Hara,
– "I ducked out of sight behind
the saw-mill"–; to the second
my Missouri driver's license,
permit to meet old bums and
Leningrad cowboys roaring
across American roads; and, to
the third, a "Quick Pick" ticket
for our lottery and $20 bill, just
in case these numbers are not right
aligned with Lady Luck's. She
was charming, that ambassador.
I shook her hand. I walked outside.
Crowds stepped to the Kauppatori.

"From the inside out"
Review by Fiona Sampson, The Irish Times, Saturday 20th September 2008

Eamonn Wall: 'capable of drawing the mind's eye onward'

... Eamonn Wall's A Tour of Your Country, as its title suggests, looks resolutely outward, to a landscape built from the man-made and the remembered; compound, too, of the US, Ireland and - more unusually - Scandinavia. Palimpsests of imagery and resonance emerge.

When Wall, who seems to have a weakness for list-poems, invokes a multiple bestiary ("Array of hedgehogs/ Catch of fish"), in Of Multitude, to "Remember me", we hear not only Dido's lament and Shakespearean spells but Psalm 144.

Elsewhere - though it's not explained that she was a great Finnish modernist rather than a place - Stanzas from Mirkka Rekola seems to be set in "Wyoming" yet demonstrates how rural scenes could equally be North American, Irish or Finnish.

Country ways are existential, in the temperate north, at least, and "Darkness drums incessantly downward beyond dogma/ To tenderness". It's a synthesis made explicit in Hearing the Ambassador Speak, where the narrator imagines handing-out symbols of US culture to students in a Helsinki park.

Wall's unique achievement is to understand that landscape is culture. Among several poems in praise of Boise - "It would be cool/ to live in Boise" (Hammer Coffee Shop, Boise) - the book's final poem, Leaving Boise, though ostensibly describing a road-trip away from the city, stitches personal experience into the wider history of Irish emigration, "Not one of us/ willing or able to put America behind us".

Not only the US but Ireland is full of wonders and pleasures for this generous writer: "I cannot forget single excitements", as A Route to Dunbrody has it.

But Wall is also a poet capable of drawing the mind's eye onward, "through Shelmaliere West Bantry to Ballaghkeen", to insight: "Cistercians answered each urge to go by staying/ put, that insistence I often heard but did not heed".

Fiona Sampson is the editor of Poetry Review. Her latest collection is Common Prayer (2007)

Review by Paddy Kehoe, THE RTE GUIDE, July 2008
Rating: *****

Resident now for over 25 years in the US, Eamonn Wall celebrates life, wherever he may be, with a kind of unwitting optimism. He eavesdrops in Idaho on the chit chat of two women knitting in the Hammer Coffee Shop, Boise, where "the espresso machine shrieks up/ and up higher than the radio like/ Ian Gillan on an old long-player". The latter is perhaps the most accessible poem in this, Wall's fifty book for Salmon Poetry. Always conscious throughout his work of the US immigrant experiences of other peoples as well as his own Irish one, the poet recalls the passage by train of Basque shepherds to their new holdings in another Idaho poem, Basque Museum, Boise. Irish history, heritage and, indeed, bird life, are abiding features in the Wall mindscape, while the poems Helsinki Sequence and Kaamos are inspired by time spent in Finland. A hugely impressive collection.