Tour of Your Country

In his most wide-ranging work to date, Eamonn Wall probes and meditates on the histories, habitations, landscapes and ecologies of ancestral and newly-encountered places. A Tour of Your Country takes the reader from the American West to the Arctic to Wall's native Wexford, and to some spaces in-between.

Throughout, the poems record and explore the finely-tuned tension that exists between the road and home, between routes and roots, and between the physical world and how poets have been conditioned to observe and represent it. This new collection is a highly-charged literary work-one that engages in dialogues with an array of sources to create a new kind of map of the space that is common to us all.

"Resident now for over 25 years in the US, Eamonn Wall celebrates life, wherever he may be, with a kind of unwitting optimism. He eavesdrops in Idaho on the chit chat of two women knitting in the Hammer Coffee Shop, Boise, where "the espresso machine shrieks up / and up higher than the radio like / Ian Gillan on an old long-player". The latter is perhaps the most accessible poem in this, Wall's fifty book for Salmon Poetry. Always conscious throughout his work of the US immigrant experiences of other peoples as well as his own Irish one, the poet recalls the passage by train of Basque shepherds to their new holdings in another Idaho poem, Basque Museum, Boise. Irish history, heritage and, indeed, bird life, are abiding features in the Wall mindscape, while the poems 'Helsinki Sequence' and 'Kaamos' are inspired by time spent in Finland. A hugely impressive collection."
Paddy Kehoe, RTE Review

Eamonn Wall is a native of Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford, who now lives in Missouri. A Tour of Your Country is his fifth volume of poetry to be published by Salmon. 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.