The rich narrative poems in
My Aunts at Twilight Poker
provide nuanced and many-sided explorations of Irish and Diasporic life—with particular focus on Eamonn Wall’s hometown of Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford, and on St. Louis, Missouri, where he had lived for the past two decades—as both have unfolded through the past century. A focal point of the collection is Annie Murphy-Flood, the author’s grandmother, who arrived in Enniscorthy as a newly married young woman in the early 20th century to open a business and start a family. Her life, practice, and the example she set form the moral force that guides this collection. The book is also a homage to the lives of those who have been written out of history, and a personal response to a town that has changed but endured. In some respects a family history,
also highlights the role that places play in the development of their inhabitants. Writing from a distance across time and space allows Eamonn Wall the opportunity to recreate and observe quietly but uniquely. One home place is observed from another home place: we can belong to more than one town, city, or country. In poems that focus on the lives of the Irish overseas, Eamonn Wall asserts their connectedness to and roots in Ireland and wherever across the globe they have settled. Formally varied and blissfully alive,
is a finely tuned work, charged and captivating.