Refuge at De Soto Bend

Eamonn Wall possesses a bright eye for detail - a preacher on a plaza in New Mexico, a juke box in a Courtown café, the arrangement of objects in a window in Co. Sligo, pine needles covered in snow in South Dakota - and it is frequently from these visual images that the poems in his fourth collection take flight.

More than anything else, Refuge at De Soto Bend celebrates the joys and heartaches of time spent intensely in the light. One of the many striking themes in this collection, and in much of Eamonn Wall's acclaimed work, is migration and the search for material and emotional shelter and refuge in unfamiliar locations.

In "The Wexford Container Tragedy," both refugees and locals grieve and seek to come to terms with a new world born out of tragedy. Eamonn Wall, himself an emigrant, recasts the Irish experience of emigration in the light of a new phenomenon: emigration to Ireland. Here is a poet in tune with origins, dislocations, and the quiet moments that crave for description. Eamonn Wall observes and describes a complex world. He listens and records for us some of the resonant truths this bright life reveals about nature, family, memory, hunger, and public and private life in contemporary Ireland and America.

Eamonn Wall is a native of Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford, who now lives in Missouri. In addition to his widely published poetry, his essays and articles are collected in From the Sin-é Café to the Black Hills (University of Wisconsin Press). He teaches at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.