by Jules McCue
‘YOUR RIVERS HAVE TRAINED YOU’
And so it was that Eamonn Wall, a young man from Enniscorthy, found his way on the move as a trans-Atlantic traveller, the novelty of the road and new skies bringing that intellectual and creative freedom. Thus, his poetry exhibits a free style altering shape to a variety of themes. Another significant element to his life and inspiration is the river; water, both literal and littoral, both inspiration and anchor. Of the primordial waters we came, especially, the rivers in places he inhabits that are emblematic of a universality of humanity’s states of intensity and existence. He, as did Eoghan Ruadh, returned to their riverside homes around Christmas.
Eamonn Wall continues in the tradition of rivers as muse and mentor. They become a necessity in the function of his life and work, growing up, as he did, adjacent to the Slaney, a river of historical and geographical importance:
You’ve got to leave home.
You don’t want to do it too soon.
Or leave it too long.
Your rivers have trained you,
Oceans prepared you.
Lakes have assumed you.
You don’t want to do it too soon
Hudson, Missouri, Mississippi: your rivers are majestic.
The Slaney has assumed your face’s fair shape.
Jesus, see my shadow. My body is becoming air.
Or leave it too long . .
He emphasises the strong symbolic value of the Slaney – ‘it takes you out of the place and brings you back’. The river dominates, keeps him home, but at the same time he is anxious to go, to visit other places and had to take the step of crossing the threshold, transitioning into maturity to enable wholistic growth.
In the documentary Your rivers have trained you, Wall reminds us of the greater significance of Enniscorthy, The Croppy Boy sung in the background. He describes the place where the events took place as ‘emotional geography’. Much commemorated in literature and music, the 1798 legend lives on in the town because the geography and townscape have changed little. Wall walks the same trails meandering alongside the Slaney. That is his Enniscorthy, a place of enduring pain, and ancient prayer represented here by his poem, ‘Night Heron’:
Eschews
Migration path and famine road . . .
And bridges
Laid like legs of lego
In lines traversing
Ancient streams
And ponds of prayer and plenty
. . .
Eschews
A long-winged Canóg Dhubh
Released
Under the yellow
Lights of Wexford Bridge
From which for us
Our croppied martyrs
Swung
A TOUR OF YOUR COUNTRY
Unlike lyric poetry, in Wall’s poetic practice, style and form do not surpass themes. Structure and content are blended. However, he continues to use some of the mechanics of Irish traditional poetry, such as alliteration, repetition, assonance, and rhyme, evident in ‘Yellowstone Bus Tour’:
Great Fountain Geyser
Fire River and Falls
White Dome Geyser
Tangle Creek
Hot Lake
Celestine Pool/Hot Dog Pool
Mud Pot
. . . .
Coyote in the bushes
. . . .
Moose on the road
That night
I prayed too
For the trees
That fire
Might Spare
A little longer
Their coniferous
Bones
He sculpts iconic images. We get ‘the feel’ without being on the tour. The title of the collection, A Tour of Your Country includes a second person address, it’s a Wall thing. Sometimes he speaks to himself in the second person but here it is ambiguous, we may ask ‘Whose Country?’ Wall moves between the two worlds of poems and places, not unattuned to the destruction of our earth and groups of people, past and present; themes expressed here in ‘A Tour of Your City’:
Hardly, through westward channels & grin gaps &
timbers retaining bottles & cans & under bridges &
below cider drinkers & tied craft, your river, always
within you, enters the western bay. We can’t know
its right purpose nor can we count each round cycle
of its time, being distant from its massive lakes & the
rounded stones, of its underworld. No more than we
might follow second-hand our own blood’s course
hardened this instant by a school bus shriek to stop.
under this refracted light, strangers to earth and water,
we walk another tribe’s amber smoothed path to see,
as we depart, sets of tangled wires shaped to save us.
Sets of tangled wires shaped to save us: how does a poet express existence in many, complex worlds at the same time? Wall asks himself:
Traveler, do you note the waft and scent
Of sage by our backyard fence in May? Do sandhill
Cranes still traverse the silent land, geese
Gather in thousands come November at De Soto Bend?
In his most recent collection, My Aunts at Twilight Poker, Wall, the man, meanders his way into and across boundaries, myth, history, disaster, love, birth and death.
Midsummer’s Eve
The fields are littered with ruins and heartache.
The towns carry the weight of disease and pain.
The great leaders will build a road across Tara.
The small men in the small towns will fell the last Oak.
The collection is an interweaving of place, love for family, Irish heroes, nature, politics, colonialism and environmental themes persist. In ‘Grandmother Tugs the Drayman’s Arm’, he etches on old-fashioned image of animal cruelty, not limited to Ireland:
Though the Slaney has deepened its rolling
Bed, grandmother retains her spot
On Barrack St., fixed between drayman’s
Whip and blinkered beast. Perhaps I recall,
Wall’s poetry also reflects changing society and culture, imparted from profound sincerity: no sycophantry. In ‘Masculinity’, he uses Ó Rathaille’s style of strong and simple rhythms to describe the hardworking, traditional local Wexford men:
Hand on hand was a mode
Of speech among men I grew
Up around; they were rough
And smooth, of farm and town.
I watched their heads incline,
Bind together with their eyes.
I have crossed the ocean wide.
He writes of his aunts playing poker at twilight and how, entertainingly, they retold the rich stories of Ireland’s history, though never conscious of telling stories – ‘better than the history books’ he says, as the ‘past becomes alive’. He links their story-telling to the ‘beginnings of literature’, stressing that ‘they don’t have to be true’. In ‘William Faulkner’s Rowan Oak’, Wall reminds us of a brutal history in which we share as tourists in another’s land:
Long bereft
Of ladies’ airs, today’s Rowan Oak’s
A dusty death trap frying pan.
Colonel Robert Sheegog
A Scotch-Irish planter from Tennessee,
An immigrant like me, raised his home
From Princess Hoka’s Chickasaw trail of tears
Tears of grief and hopelessness, shared around the colonial world; an enduring pain from our ancestors, passed on through inter-generational trauma.
At the beginning of 2020, Wall reminds us in his poem ‘Postcards from Missouri’, that as 2019 ended, ‘Australia burned’ and by October 2020 the pandemic invented new behaviours, quaking fear in our hearts:
Does the pandemic
deepen
your soul’s tenor
or does it drive you
to despise
your neighbour’s leaf
blower, and dry
demeanor
a soupçon more?
Discombobulation, fear, lock-downs, almost military style policing of newly enforced laws, terrorised the world. Eamonn Wall will see Melbourne, the city that was said to have the most stringent lockdown laws in the world, when he presents his paper ‘Uncertain Terrains: Writing from the Borderlands in Ireland and North America at the ISAANZ conference.
Poetry Collections
My Aunts Twilight Poker (2023)
Junction City: New and Selected Poems 1990-2015 (2015)
Sailing Lake Mareotis (2011)
A Tour of Your Country (2008)
Refuge at De Soto Bend (2004)
The Crosses (2000)
Iron Mountain Road (1997)
Dyckman-200th Street (1994)
Both Jules McCue and Eamonn Wall are presenting papers at the Irish Studies in Australia and New Zealand (ISAANZ) in Melbourne on December 14. See https://isaanz.org/2023/11/20/isaanz-26/ for the full programme.
Tinteán 