It is Eamonn Wall’s exceptional achievement as a poet to have extended the sources and vision of his work on the open road of America while remaining vividly in step with whatever he encounters anywhere, and to have done so without losing sight of the horizon of the past likewise expanding intricately behind.
His work also stands as witness to the migrant nature of human existence. At the same time, Wall’s ambition to create a technically hybrid poetry that draws from the aesthetic resources of both the Irish and American traditions of verse-making has found greater and greater impress in the work, as well as greater and greater variety.
Eamonn Wall is a native of Co. Wexford who emigrated to the USA in 1982. He lives in St. Louis and is employed by the University of Missouri-St. Louis as Smurfit-Stone Corporation Professor in Irish Studies. He teaches courses in Irish, Irish-American and British Literature, curates the university’s Irish Lectures and Performances Series, and directs the summer study abroad program in Galway.