Learning to forget

When Eamon Wall says "I have double vision", he's not referring to his spectacles, but to his dual perspective on the world as a native of Enniscorthy, Co Wexford, and a US resident of 15 years' standing. "When I look at one landscape I see it always through the lens of the other," he muses. "It's a hybrid view."

Hence, in a poem like `Weather Reports', the vision of his children with their sleds in snowy Nebraska reminds him of a snowman he saw in Enniscorthy. `Weather Reports' is in The Crosses, his third collection, which has just been published by Salmon. His vision ranges from the 1798 bicentenary celebrations in Enniscorthy to the eviction of the Sioux Indians from the Black Hills of South Dakota; from the candle in the window of Aras an Uachtarain to the Mississippi Delta, from Brendan Bowyer and The Hucklebuck to Emmylou Harris and Hank Williams.

Wall left Ireland in the 1980s along with thousands of other young emigrants who couldn't find work in the then depressed Irish economy. He does not take a self-pitying stance, maintaining that he chose to leave and, having made a life for himself as an academic in America (he did his PhD at City University, New York), chose not to return. "I didn't actually decide in some rational manner that I was going to stay; I just realised at some point that I was staying, since the work was there," he says. He now finds himself one of a number of Irish writers who have made the US their home, including Eamon Grennan, Emer Martin, Sara Berkeley, Michael Collins and Colum McCann. "Our status is not quite commuter - that's too glib - but it would be too heavy to call us exiles because few of us felt compelled to leave."

Neither can they call themselves Americans: "Our formative experiences are Irish. But we have a hyphenated status in Ireland because we don't live here. We navigate our way between the two, simultaneously inside and outside."

I suggest that, like Joyce, perhaps Irish writers need to go abroad to be able to write about Ireland. Wall replies: "For me it was liberating to look back on Ireland and write about it from that different perspective. Even more liberating was contact with American writing by Langston Hughes, Frank O'Hara and Adrienne Rich." His mentor, and another strong influence on his work, was Irish poet James Liddy, a professor at the University of Milwaukee in Wisconsin. As a teenager in Enniscorthy, Wall devoured the Beat poets, being especially influenced by Kerouac and Snyder: "They opened up America for me, made me realise that there were things in America I'd like to see." Living in America has influenced his style, which is conversational, and often includes the language of the road: motels, railroads, highways, gas stations and fast food joints.

He notes that Irish poets in the last two decades take their frame of reference from the US, not the UK: "Irish poets of my generation and younger are influenced by and interested in what's happening in American poetry. Eavan Boland has helped to disseminate American poetry to Irish poets." E Cafe to the Black Hills (1999), Wall mentions Boland as another Irish writer who has been marked by exile and who was forced to rebuild her identity as a result of her experience. She left Ireland at the age of five becaus of her father's career as a diplomat, returning only as a young adult (she now teaches Creative Writing at Stanford University in California): "Boland's accounts of her childhood outside Ireland, revealed in both her poetry and essays, have been of tremendous interest to me. All emigres, exiles, and dislocated people are confronted by the distance between where they are now and the place of childhood. We must, like Boland, fill the void." For Wall, "no place on earth can equal the locus of childhood." This means becoming part of the great Irish tradition of mourning the separation from that landscape: "In fact, what defines Irish attachment to place so well is absence." Many of his poems recall summer trips to Wexford beaches: Cahore, Courtown and Ardamine; fishing in the Slaney; tea and toast with his grandmother, the Strawberry Fair in Enniscorthy.

For the last seven years, Wall has brought a group of American students to study Irish literature, culture and politics in TCD for a month in the summer. He is about to move from Creighton, Nebraska - where he worked at Creighton University as Associate Professor in the English Department, teaching a course on contemporary Irish writing - to the University of Missouri at St Louis. "Michael Smurfit has sponsored, in honour of his father, the Jefferson Smurfit Chair of Irish Studies at St Louis and I am going to be co-holder of the Chair, along with musicologist Gearoid O hAllmhurain, " uin," says Wall.

He notes that Irish Studies is a subject that is becoming more widespread in American universities: "Relative to the number of Irish Americans in the US, there have not been as many Irish Studies programmes as there should be, but this is changing now because Irish-Americans are more prosperous and are putting money into Irish culture." He finds a hugely positive response from students, many of whom have no Irish connections, towards studying Irish culture. "They see Ireland as a hip, hot place. They already know a bit about Irish music and film, and they want to know more," he says.

Although he writes primarily for an Irish audience and is published in Ireland, Wall feels exhilarated by belonging to a wave of multicultural writers in the US: "Reading the books of Chinese Americans, Korean Americans, Caribbean Americans, I feel very much at home. They are exploring the same sort of issues as I am, of adapting to American life, of excitement and estrangement. Their writing is the most experimental and daring that is happening in the US at the moment."

He notes that there is a strong tradition of Irish American fiction, by writers such as William Kennedy and Mary Gordon, but that this fiction has tended to be bleak and old-fashioned in its themes and forms: "Technically the writing didn't advance. Irish American novelists didn't seem to learn from Joyce or Faulkner. But it is changing. Alice McDermott's novel, Charming Billy, which won the National Book Award last year, takes a traditional story of an Irish-American family gathering at the funeral of a ne'er-do-well and, using a brilliant narrative, makes this rather hackneyed story into something new."

Doesn't he ever get tired of reflecting upon the Irish scene and long to really assimilate into American life? "No, because I have a voracious appetite for all things Irish. But I also have a fascination with everything to do with America too, and that includes the American South West, which is a world totally removed from Ireland." In one of his essays he neatly sums up the dilemma of the Irish living abroad: "To survive, we need to be able to begin the process of forgetting. Paradoxically, being Irish, our deepest desire is to remember and recreate everything."

The Crosses is published by Salmon at £6.99