Junction City: New and Selected Poems 1990–2015 by Eamonn Wall (review)

Eamonn Wall begins his Selected Poems with an epigraph from Lawrence Ferlinghetti: “I like it here / and won’t go back / to where I came from.” Those of us who have known and admired his poetry for more than two decades now, since the publication of his first collection, Dyckman-200th Street (1994), hope this may be read as personal statement. In each of Wall’s books, we find a striking devotion to place, which inevitably carries with it the pain of being uprooted. Wall is thus situated as much in a distinguished lineage of poets who invoke the dinnseanchas tradition, the Irish lore of placenames, both as a poet and as a participant in what was, until relatively recently, the American-centered ecocritical movement.

An overview of Wall’s titles, all of which were published by Salmon Poetry, is the easiest way to discern the pattern—from his first book, which refers to a place in New York City, specifically, the Inwood neighborhood where he lived after leaving Ireland, to Iron Mountain Road (1997), a scenic highway through South Dakota’s Black Hills, a site sacred to Native Americans, who were promised the land in perpetuity, but then displaced following European-Americans’ discovery of gold. “Father, Father” is an elegy for Isaac Bashevis Singer, the Polish-born Jewish writer who emigrated with his family to New York City prior to the Nazi invasion of Poland, and who died while Wall was completing a Ph.D. at CUNY Graduate Center. His poem recalls an era of massive human displacements, paralleling it with that of earlier Irish immigrants; when Wall recalls, “hearing your dead language spoken in diners on Columbus Avenue,” the reference to Yiddish also reminds us of the those arrivals from Ireland whose own language was often abandoned upon arrival. “Four Stern Faces/South Dakota” beautifully juxtaposes Wall’s concerns, as someone settling into a tenure track position in Omaha while studying for the civics test required to apply for citizenship. The “four stern faces” of Mount Rushmore compel him to move forward while simultaneously looking back to his family and Ireland, where he felt the impact of the assassination of JFK as vividly as any American would: “one morning in Dublin when it finally struck / that heroes are flowers that are constantly dying on these black and holy hills.” As Wall speaks of the Irish-American president, he likewise recalls Irish heroes, as well as the Lakota who were displaced from the land.

Wall’s averral, “The immigrant has witnessed two worlds,” is a theme continued in the next volume, The Crosses (2000), which takes its title from an elegy for Don Martinez, who “underlined for me the desolation / of these highways: the mockery of place names among great continuities.” The volume takes the reader on a road trip from Cody to Las Cruces to Pueblo to Walsenburg to East Texas— “slowed down by quiet humiliations of migrant life.” The geographic region of the poem is largely the land ceded by Mexico to the United States, reminding us of yet another massive, ongoing displacement of people that echoes that of Native Americans—as well as, of course, that of the Irish themselves. The collection’s title poem, “Junction City,” appears in this volume as well, and although Wall is quick to point out that other states have towns named “Junction City,” this poem, as well as others in the collection, suggest he is talking about Junction City, Kansas, a town very near the geographic center of the United States, named for a confluence of rivers that is a motif throughout the collection.

Refuge at DeSoto Bend (2004), though set in St. Louis, nonetheless glances back repeatedly to the contemporary displacement of new immigrants to Ireland. The tide of immigration reversed during the Celtic Tiger, when economic growth made Ireland one of the most prosperous of EU countries, while simultaneously increasing the gap...