Eamonn Wall
From Oven Lane To Sun Prairie: In Search of Irish America
ISBN: 9781851322091
From Oven Lane to Sun Prairie: In Search of Irish America is an invigorating and nuanced critical exploration of Irish, American and Irish American locations, intersections, disjunctions, artistic visions and personal endeavours. Entering the domains of poets, musicians and visual artists, Eamonn Wall investigates work created by men and women – from Georgia O’Keeffe to Derek Mahon – who belong both to Ireland and America to reveal how what has been written, painted, composed and performed resists binary notions of belonging. He shows us how even a short period spent by an Irish artist in America, or an American artist in Ireland, can profoundly influence how that artist thinks and creates. In the arts, short attachments can run deep and be long-enduring. From Oven Lane to Sun Prairie: In Search of Irish America asks us to think again about what it means to be an American living in Ireland, or an Irish person resident in the USA, and to consider enlarging and refining our definitions of Irish America.
Eamonn Wall’s prose books include Writing the Irish West: Ecologies & Traditions (Notre Dame, 2011) and From the Sin-é Café to the Black: Hills Notes on the New Irish (Wisconsin, 2000), awarded the Michael J. Durkan Prize from ACIS for excellence in scholarship. Also widely published as a poet, his most recent collection is Junction City: New & Selected Poems 1990-2015 (Salmon, 2015). He is a professor of International Studies and English at the University of Missouri-St Louis.