“Irish American” is a designation of dubious repute, evoking green beer on St. Patrick’s Day, leprechauns, Notre Dame football, and a view of the Ould Sod hazily glimpsed through a lens of nostalgia and Guinness. During the Troubles, the paramilitaries could count on financial support from the American “ira”—i.e., Inebriated Republicans in Armchairs.
Eamonn Wall, a poet from County Wexford who has lived in the United States for many years, has surely experienced lots of this silliness and has probably listened politely to more than his share of Emerald Isle guff. His approach in this very welcome book, however, is not to lampoon or to rebuke, but to redefine what is meant by Irish America, exploring the lives and work of “artists who belong to Ireland and America in various ways and at multiple levels.” In his book, “Binaries, such as Irish American, are broken down and . . . revised or replaced by interdependence and exchange between Ireland and America.”
Just as Irish culture is partially American (as all cultures are now partially American), American culture is partially Irish in its makeup: think of George M. Cohan, Bing Crosby, Scarlett O’Hara—and are you old enough to have listened to Fibber McGee and Molly on the radio? During the many years I have spent either living in Ireland or traveling back and forth on various academic and journalistic assignments, I have been humbled by the realization that my Irish interlocutors often know my own
