Iron Mountain Road by Eamonn Wall (review)
1997; Philosophy Documentation Center; Volume: 1; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/nhr.1997.a925381
ISSN1534-5815
Autores Tópico(s)Archaeological Research and Protection
Resumoing enemies; a really loyal friend; a bellwether at various points; uncannily prescient about changes in the wind of history, a man of dazzling charm; the best friend an intelligent woman could have; a sexually insecure lover ("that kind of thing I can do for myself,"Florence Farr intriguingly remarked); honestly committed to freedom of thought; a proper hero of the artistic life; not guilty of any downright meanness; an Irishman who whether in love or hate wrote for his own people, yet went the prophet's way, without honor in his own country, more and more in his later years, from fear of an emerging Catholic majority; an unashamed elitist, seeing the glories of an Ascendancy past through the lens of nostalgia. Roy Foster's biography of Yeats is a daring conception of how to represent a life, one that I have never seen before, and one I do not recommend to another . How he carried it off is beyond me—the difficulties in plotting a narrative against narrative, a chronology insubordinated to theme, must have been immense—but that he managed it in the end with panache I do not doubt. And it is a biography of a kind to be of the most possible use to other students of the poet, who will thank Roy Foster for not providing definitive reinterpretations of all the poems. That we will be glad to do on our own, thank you very much, world without end, amen. For that coming wave of reinterpretations of the poetry, I guess Professor Foster will have to answer, when a Romany-looking ghost turns up one midnight, wafted on a fume of muscatel in a study at Hertford College, Oxford. ADRIAN FRAZIER Eamonn Wall. Iron Mountain Road. Cliffs of Moher, Co. Clare: Salmon Poetry, . Chester Springs, PA: Dufour, . $. (cloth), $. (paper). Eamonn Wall is right now riding the wave of a fine creative push of fiction, essays, and, of course, his poetry. Following two chapbooks and a volume, we now have Iron Mountain Road, a shining book of Ireland and the American West. How unlikely a place for an Irish immigrant is Omaha, to which the vagaries of academic employment have brought Wall? No more nor less likely than any place else, or so this new book emphatically declares, for one message here is that there are no unlikely places: we carry along the places that have made and defined us wherever we go. Signaling both location and movement, Wall's two books have road names for titles: Dyckman—th Street is the other one. His poetry celebrates both the persistence of place and the challenge of migration, which he calls"this / slow mid-morning pilgrimage I drive"in the opening poem of Iron Mountain Road. Happily, his is always a lower-case pilReviews : Léirmheasanna grimage, for Wall stresses connection with the ordinary rather than the tourist's egocentric trumpeting (of which there is no dearth elsewhere in contemporary verse). In these poems, there is an engaging self-deprecation grounded in specific , lived detail, through which Wall earns the occasional dazzling piece of generalizing wisdom. For example, the last poem in this book begins with a scattering of disparate times and places in the speaker's native Wexford, and ends with a powerful articulation of the artist's desire to stop time and make meaning, a reach for defining recall of one day, one hour, to slow the headlong sweep of the everyday toward oblivion: We are easily replaced and forgotten, so skies and rivers are what we have learned to call discourse. I am one man—you need to know this—grey rooftop & water, undissolved by absence, crossing the old bridge from the Shannon to the other side of town. In two notable poems that gloss his overall poetic enterprise, Wall claims kinship with Jewish-American writers, whose deaths prompt him to define cultural hybridity and to declare faith in the value of recording this dual state. In "Father, Father,"the speaker emerges from the Port Authority bus terminal into the rattle and hum of lower Manhattan to hear"the word on the street"of Isaac Bashevis Singer's death. Here a shared relationship with...
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