From the Sin-é Café to the Black Hills: Notes on the New Irish by Eamonn Wall

Abstract

3 2 6 WAL 3 5 . 3 FALL 2 0 0 0 This new book/essay is a fitting complement to McMurtry’s earlier vol­ ume, the 1968 collection In a Narrow Grave, a book that remains one of the finest series of observations about Texas ever published. Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen demonstrates the quality of wisdom that comes from both age and experience and maps the intellectual progress ofa professional reader. Here are the ruminations of an individual whose devotion to books evolved as his dis­ tance from the isolated prairie town of Archer City expanded, then solidified as that distance disappeared upon his ultimate return. Therein lies the greater irony of the whole volume, perhaps of contemporary letters in general. From the Sin-é Café to the Black Hills: Notes on the New Irish . By Hamonn Wall. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000. 139 pages, $34.95/$16.95. Reviewed by Su san N aram ore M aher University of Nebraska at Omaha The title of Eamonn Wall’s recent collection of essays denotes a new chapter in the tangled history of the Irish diaspora: the surge in Irish emigra­ tion between the 1980s and early 1990s. Now closed, New York’s Sin-é Café provided the New Irish with a home away from home in the East Village, “a postmodern, downtown, fin de siècle Gaelic Park with attitude” (10). The Black Hills mark the extension of the New Irish across the continent. Wall’s personal journey away from Ireland has taken him to Milwaukee, New York City, Omaha, and now to St. Louis. His eloquent “notes on the New Irish” establish connections to older stories of exile and also create new contexts of contact. In the Black Hills, Wall’s vision penetrates the shabby surface of tourist traps and consumable history, revealing for him a profound nexus link­ ing the many stories, the troubled histories, and the spiritual myths of the Irish, the American, and the Native American. Wall’s subtle analysis, using a fam­ ily road trip to structure his comments, aligns discussions of Wendy Rose, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Irish rock bands, Eavan Boland, and Seamus Heaney, among others, to unravel the aftermath of colonization. “When I traveled to the Black Hills,” Wall explains, “I was drawn into history. There was nothing I could do about it, and I felt the landscape invite me: first to listen, then to read, and, finally, to speak” (118). Wall’s lively intelligence, his agility with farflung ideas, and his brilliance of language invite the reader in, as well as com­ mand and engage our attention. In particular, Wall’s essays highlight the contributions of many New Irish writers to contemporary American literature. Some are the sons and daughters of Irish immigrants, like Mary Gordon and Michael Stephens. Others are emi­ grants to Ireland, like Ben Howard or Knute Skinner. Still others, migrants like Wall, have green cards. All present in their fiction and poetry “a double vision—Irish and American, local and international” (79). Wall’s notes run BOOK REVIEWS 3 2 7 the gamut from interview to fiction to textual and historical analysis. Undergirding the entire collection is Wall’s personal story: a young Irish man immigrating to America, furthering his education, finding gainful employ­ ment, and establishing, with his wife Dru, family and a new home. In travel­ ing to the American West, Wall recapitulates myth, but with attitude: his own poetry (seen most recently in Iron Mountain Road) speaks to the development of a “hybrid imagination” (107). It is this hybridity that Wall finds most com­ pelling in New Irish writing. As fiction writer Helena Mulkerns explains in an interview, “We don’t want to forsake what we came from, and we can’t leave our homeland forever like previous immigrants. We have a great, lively cul­ ture, and I think that we’ve come over here aware of that and being able to draw on it, as opposed to trying to forget our origins, or romanticize them” (60). This fluidity, enhanced by air travel, fax machines, and the Internet, has irrevocably changed the conditions of exile and complicated assimilation. The movement from East Coast...