by Jules McCue
The poetry of trans-Atlantic Eamonn Wall
A Gaelic Heritage
In his ground-breaking book, The Hidden Ireland, Daniel Corkery discusses the hidden places and secret worlds where traditional Gaelic culture was kept alive during the penal years, especially and most importantly, through the verse and song of the old poets:
In such moments he saw himself with clear eyes: in one such, the Spirit of Ireland came before him, as radiant as ever, with reproach in his eyes: “Do not insult me, Bright Shape of the Fair Tresses,” the tortured poet cried to her, “by the Book in my hand I swear I am not of them; but by the very hair of the head I was snatched away and sent over the floods, helping him [the English Monarch] that I do not wish to help, in the ships of the bullets on the foaming sea, I that come of the stock of the Gaels of Cashel of the Provincial Kings…
These are the words of the Gaelic poet Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin, born in Meentogues, in 1748, County Kerry. The eighteenth-century poet was described as a wanderer, ‘a wastrel with a loud laugh’, wild and reckless. This wasn’t the first time he found himself in trouble, when exiled to a man o’ war enduring the cruel discipline of the English military. Nor was it the last. He was though, much loved by ‘his downtrodden and hungry people’. After the fall of the Gaelic Order; the patronage of related Big Houses; and the ensuing Flights of Earls and Wild Geese, these poets were forced to find other work to procure a meagre subsistence. Poets of the ancient, Gaelic tradition and spade-carrying spailpíns, they hit the road with the seasons to labour in other parts. Once the great aristocratic race descended from the mythic Milesius, now a mass of peasants. The poets were the intellectuals of Gaelic society, trained in history, law, the terrain, and genealogy. From the pinnacle of the social hierarchy, they were forced by the oppressor to ‘step down’. The Gaelic Schools of poetry, that once attracted poor and rich scholars from other countries, closed around 1690.
Some earned their living labouring, school mastering, smithing, shepherding and keeping taverns. A sharp contrast to twentieth-century Seamus Heaney who reminds us in his poem ‘Digging’ that he of another new Ireland, had replaced his father’s spade with a squat pen. Teaching for Heaney and the modern-day poet Eamonn Wall is not just a secure income, but importantly, a way of passing the baton.
Ó Súilleabháin‘s homeland was poor land, and as did his predecessor, Aodhoghán Ó Rathaille [1670-1726], he composed magnificent verse in the same part of what had become ‘outland’ countryside. In his last ever verse, Ó Rathaille farewells the rivers. Daniel Corkery describes Ó Rathaille’s last poem as being ‘strong, mournful, aloof’, an elegy to his country, like the ‘great litanies of racial sorrow’. Home and rivers are themes connecting the Gaelic poets those of today.
A ‘New Irish’ Poet
The modern-day poet, Eamonn Wall, Professor of Irish and Professor of English at the University of Missouri-St Louis, left Enniscorthy, Ireland in the 1980s for America, part of the ‘New Irish’, emigrants with a different experience, one that keeps them connected to home in ways that were not possible for the Gaelic poets of the eighteenth century. In his poem ‘A Route to Dunbrody’, Eamonn Wall invokes Ireland from across the water:
Across a calm estuary, we glide over Cromwellian
wreckage to lowland landscape of South Wexford.
& the broken grandeur of layered, monastic time.
Often at evening, I had driven the Dungannon Line
as the ancient lighthouse assumed night’s heartbeat.
We travelled, then, rotated by rhythms of making
tides & the necessity of hitting The Terminal Bar
by closing time. Who were my teachers? My gurus
. . . .
Today, Dunbrody is our final stop on the road home.
I sit on a stone wall watching waves of barley roll
in the halcyon late afternoon: the weather is fair,
a train passes, my children scamper across ruins.
. . . .
For guidance from our land, Fathers, I have borne
my children back to your song-lined paths and salted
brooks of Shelbourne. The road ahead will take us
through Shelmaliere West & Bantry to Ballaghkeen
Do children become the ‘littoral’ or interface that joins the émigré parent/s to the new homeland? Is the émigré in a transitioning state of ‘liminality’ until they have children born in the new country? Eamonn Wall says that having children connected him to his new home. In like manner, Anne Collett’s essay ‘The Significance of Littoral’ concerning Beverley Farmer’s novel The Seal Woman, [selkie], attempts to negotiate the ‘here and there’, the connection of water and land when moving from one location to another. She uses the concept of the ‘littoral’ to make sense of our visceral movement through time and space:
‘Just as the snorkel mask enables habitation between elements of the air and water, the seal skin figures in these stories as the interface between worlds. Skin is itself littoral—the border area between worlds.’ She explains that the selkie’s seal skin is needed for the mother now human, to return to the sea. The seal skin a littoral, that is ‘something of a mirage or a false promise’.
Poetic Invention: the Aisling
Whilst they languished in hidden places, living in a limbo or a liminal place, overlooked by the English authorities, as preferred, seventeenth and eighteenth-century Irish bards, gave birth to much poetic invention, most notably, the Aisling. In this form, the lonely poet wanders by woodland rivers and waits for the vision, the aisling, to arrive. She signifies the renewal of the Gaelic state in her form of a she-spirit or spéir bhean, ‘sky woman’. Eoghan Ruadh’s home under Sliabh Luachra was on the opposite side of the Shannon River, where his contemporary Clare-man poet, Brian Merriman wrote his now famous 1,206-line poem ‘Cúirt an Mheadhon Oidhche’, ‘The Midnight Court’.
From the Courts of Poetry, set up by Irish poets as parodies of the English obsession with laws and courts, verse became more that of the people’s; the mass of peasants who now owned Ireland as a ‘hidden vital force’. The best poet/singer summonsed others to the court by ‘warrants’, a continuation of the tradition of satire. From this verse came folk poetry from which the underlying structure of folk songs prevailed but the ancient beauty of Irish lyric poetry, some in the form of song, persisted into the literature and music of subsequent new Irelands. Corkery tells us that Eoghan Ruadh, possessing a good voice, passed the Aisling on to those who followed — ‘What perfect understanding of what lyric poetry should be—-the music arising from the perfect blending of the word, as a word heavy with its own special treasures—-music colour, associations—-the blending of this word with the thing it represents, that also heavy with its own enrichments, haphazard or integral’.
Eamonn Wall doesn’t categorically limit his poetry to being ‘lyric’ poetry. Nor is he restricted to the tradition of strict verse writing rules. He says that by migrating from Ireland to America, he was exposed to new, freer forms of poetry, he calls ‘open poetry’, with which he became familiar in New York City, his first home across the Atlantic. He stresses that since very young, traditional Irish poetry was a part of his life in Ireland. Wall explains that parents were encouraged to read poetry and sing to their infants, ‘you get song before anything else’ but he insists that he pursues a new poetry, through what he calls a ‘hybrid, trans-Atlantic form.’
‘You’ve Got to Leave Home’
Paul O’Reilly’s documentary film, Your Rivers Have Trained You, covers those negative aspects of Eamonn Wall’s Irish Catholic childhood, most especially the strict, dull and brutal years of a Christian Brothers’ primary school that affected many, young, innocent souls. Eamonn Wall’s memories of these years are poignant, so much so, that he sees his leaving an impoverished Ireland, though having grown up in a very happy and functional family, as being a good reason to leave when he did.
In America, he was steered to Irish communities who grasped onto the traditions of Gaelic Athletics and the conservative Catholic church. Transitioning is a liminal place, when the immigrant is ‘floating’; experiencing an ambivalence between fear of the unknown and a sense of excitement, being on the ‘threshold’ of adventure and a new life. He found another way to break into America, through the literary culture at the Sin-é Café, in the east village of New York; a place where literary readings and refreshments were shared, becoming a perfect meeting place from which to start out on his new, creative life. ‘Born to teach’, he took up positions around New York, to make a living. The poetry, nevertheless, flourishes. Here, some verses from ‘Unwinding the Immigrant’, are an example of a more ‘open’ style:
You are lately returned from a homeland visit. You think: to
sit for many hours among strangers in the bus depot in,
let’s say Lahore or Limerick, is, for us, wound immigrants,
a kind of salvation. If the 20:40 service to the capital is
delayed another hour, we will have passed an extra day
among the sycamores.
…
Your children move about your Iowa home as you, between
places, count the icons on her kitchen walls and hold on a
moment longer with the breeze at the roadside grotto, the
yews healthy on the hills, the virgin having descended here
once-upon-a-time
…
From One Sky to Another
These verses convey the never-ending world of transitory places endured by the émigré and the images here and there, connected through rapid air flights; especially, as he is now anchored to the new land through his children, just as he links them to his home country. But the reality of war, dispossession and the destruction of nature, continue to be juxtaposed with other themes in his poetry, evoking the vastly contrasting landscapes of the American prairie and verdant Ireland. This roving from one sky to another, inspires the imagination prior to, as he says, getting down to the intellectual process of writing. Like the best of the old Irish poets, the lines are not maudlin or sentimental. He relishes in variety of place, past and present, although we sense an underlying dolour.
He recalls a return visit to his Enniscorthy family home; his and siblings bedrooms empty, the mantelpiece awash with photos of grandchildren, they [his parents] hardly know, if at all. When his father ponders the dilemma of emigration —-‘it wasn’t supposed to happen’— now it is happening all over again. He explains the political and economic implications of the recent diaspora as history repeating itself, while he ponders as to why Ireland hasn’t learned the lessons of the past. His father, a journalist, and Eamonn, set up a new iteration of an old tradition, a thirty-year letter correspondence. Wall now has it in America; a trove of memories and intimacies surrounding migrant life, thoughts, family and local news of immediate Enniscorthy: material for new verse.
The Poet Dreams of Home
The ancient Gaelic poet played the role of journalist and comic of the time, chronicling events, births, deaths and other important genealogical information. These bards were very influential, their satire could make or break kings. Their over-zealous precociousness at least once, had them exiled from Ireland. In 575 AD Saint Colmcille, an exile and poet himself, was asked to return to Ireland to plead their case, in a dispute between the poet’s guild and the high king, who was persuaded by the saint to make peace with the poets. Colmcille returned to his monastery on Iona, a very lovely place to be exiled, where he pined for Ireland, especially his little bit of Derry. (translated by Seamus Heaney) Derry I cherish ever./It is calm, it is dear./Crowds of white Angels on their rounds/At every corner./Towards Ireland a grey eye/Will look back but not to see/Ever again/The men of Ireland or her women.
In his poem ‘Unwinding the Immigrant’ the poet Eamonn Wall writes as if in a dream:
There are no mountains on this prairie, and scarcely, in
most places, a copse of trees beyond huddled cottonwoods
visible from the summits of the hills. Once, in Blair,
Nebraska, you were witness to such a view, Seattle’s Best
and kitchen-table cries now thawing you awake.
Only to be abruptly awakened from his dreaming to the sweet sounds of domestic reality. This brings to mind Patrick Kavanagh’s recollection of distraction from poetic musings in early twentieth century Monaghan in his autobiographical The Green Fool: ‘Down below in our kitchen visitors and customers were talking. Their conversation intruded a little at times on my mystic reveries’.
Kavanagh too, is charmed by his distractions, for it is the buzz of local colour that kindled the seeds of inspiration. He later describes the dilemma of the two worlds between which he hovers:
Among my own little hills and poplar-lined roads was all the romance. For there my imagination had planted in childhood the seeds of whimsical poetry.
. . . . Having knocked and knocked at the door of Literature it was eventually opened, and then I did not want to enter. The clay of wet fields was about my feet . .
He is on the threshold, transitioning from farmer to poet, from physical to intellectual.
The curse and safety of the net
In the documentary film Your Rivers Have Trained You, Eamonn Wall tells us, ‘that emigration was both a curse and a safety net’- but a parent has lost his child, even from the supposedly new, bright Ireland. Wall has had to leave, a self-appointed émigré of a line of Irish poets and writers who had to ‘fly by those nets.’ They saw the risk of becoming too parochial or provincial, prompting the need to go to other lands. Wall captures delicately, a sense of place wherever he goes.
The Irish writer Seán O’Faolain in The Story of the Irish expands on the idea of ‘the feeling of a place’ or ‘that feel of a country’. You get the ‘sap’ on arrival, but especially, he says that Ireland’s feeling is most transparently felt: ‘Ireland has a distinct feel’ even with her faults she is much-loved: ‘Ireland has achieved likewise a certain character that draws her children home and that pleases visitors and, though in itself indescribable, it defines her’. Eamonn Wall remarks that it is extraordinary how Ireland emerges from a long-suffering past as to being viewed as a country of mostly good-humoured people. He observes on his return trips, the people in Enniscorthy as being pleasant, intelligent conversationalists, when one might expect a deep chagrin at this juncture of history: just as poetry might be saturated in sentimental parochialism.
To be continued…..
Jules McCue and Eamonn Wall will be presenting at this year’s Irish Studies in Australia and New Zealand (ISAANZ) at The Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, December 12-14.
References
Daniel Corkery, The Hidden Ireland, Gill and MacMillan, Dublin, 1967
Eamonn Wall, ‘A Route to Dunbrody’, from the collection A Tour of Your Country, Salmon Poetry, Cliffs of Moher, Clare,, Ireland, 2008, p.9.
Anne Collett, ‘The Significance of the Littoral in Beverley Farmer’s Novel The Seal Woman’, in Manifesting Australian Literary Feminisms, Nexus and Faultlines, Australian Literary Studies, 2009
Daniel Corkery, The Hidden Ireland.
Eamonn Wall, ‘Unwinding the Immigrant’, in the collection, Junction City: New and Selected Poems 1909-2015, Salmon Poetry, Ireland.
Seamus Heaney, Open Ground, Poems 1966-1996, Faber & Faber, London, 1996
Patrick Kavanagh, The Green Fool, Penguin Books, 1975
Seán Ó Faoláin, The Irish, Pelican Books, 1969; The Story of the Irish People, Avenel Books, 1982
Paul O’Reilly, Your Rivers Have Trained You, Lowland Films, Scaltsa Media 2014
Eamonn Wall, A Tour of Your Country, Salmon Poetry, 2008
Tinteán 