William Wall

Portrait by David Sleator (The Gloss, 2017)	Photo by Liz Kirwan	Drue Heinz Award (2017)

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[ See also his translation of “Oíche Nollaig na mBan" by Seán Ó Ríordáin - supra. ]

Bibliographical details
No Paradiso (Brandon Press 2006), 191pp. - stories [”Dionysus and the Titans”; “What Slim Boy, O Pyrrha”; “The Bestiary”; “Surrender”; “From the Hughes Banana”, “In Xanadu”; “Nero Was An Angler; “The William Walls”, &c.].

Available copies

Mathematics & Other Poems (Cork: Collins Press 1997) - see copy as attached. ‘The Mountain Road’, in Granta: The Magazine of New Writing [Granta 135] (19 April 2016) - see copy as attached.

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Commentary

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Sue Leonard, reviewing Map of Tenderness in Books Ireland (Sept. 2002), writes: ‘The Map of Tenderness is, above all, a love story. The opening chapters featuring Joe and Suzie makes exquisite reading. But it is the lasting bo[n]ds of love that make Wall’s novel great. Scared of developing Huntingdon’s[,] Joe wants to “spare” Suzie, but she is made of sterner stuff, bringing an element of hope and strength to the novel. And over it all, there’s the enduring love of Joe’s parents [...]’.

Sue Leonard, review of This is the Country, in Books Ireland (Dec. 2005), p.286: ‘[...] This is the Country is a novel covering the bleakness of the underbelly of Irish life. It could be an unbearably harsh read, but Wall has infused his tale with lyricism and true compassion. A bright teenager drops out to a world of drugs and violence, and hovers at the edges of gangland society in present-day Ireland. Then he makes his girlfriend pregnant. Embracing his role as lover and father, he manages to turn his life around. He becomes a marine engineer and lives a conventional life. He “even pays tax on non-cash transactions”. Then news of a murder brings back the old fears. Can he escape the violence of his past? It’s harder still, when the establishment seems set against you. / This is told in the first person by the unnamed hero. The language reflects his world, but it’s always fresh and vibrant. By the novel’s close, coherence has come in; and the words are touched with a sweet tenderness to sugar the sadness. / Wall’s novels have always had the capacity to move the reader. In this novel, the tenderness emerges more gradually; the reader will be taken by surprise when the build up of emotion becomes overwhelming. [... &c.].’

Thomas MacCarthy, “Cork Poetry in Its Wider Context” - Cork City Council Libraries

[...] William Wall, a fine poet born in Whitegate, Co. Cork, in 1955, is now better known as a novelist and short-story writer, but his poetry is still supremely crafted and deeply felt. His Kavanagh Award winning Mathematics and Other Poems (1997) is well worth studying. Gerry Murphy, the most popular Cork poet of the modern era, published his first collection, A Small Fat Boy Walking Backwards, in 1985. He published Rio de la Plata and all that in 1993, and followed this with Extracts from the Lost Log-Book of Christopher Columbus and The Empty Quarter. His Selected Poems is published in 2006. Murphy is a terrific talent, at once playful and serious, with a keen sense of irony and a craftily-disguised sense of social justice. His ‘Oedipus in Harlem’ is pithy, pitiless and profound, but a poem like ‘After Goethe’ also captures essential elements of his method and style: ‘All nine of them - the Muses of course - used to visit me. I ignored them For the warmth of your arms.’ [...]

See full version - as attached.

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John Kenny, ‘Craving the Normal’, review of This is the Country, in The Irish Times (14 May 2005), p.13: ‘Though he still sometimes works in poetry, Corkman William Wall now tends to refer to himself as a “lapsed poet”. Comparatively quietly, yet speedily, his new reputation has been established by the three novels he has published in the last five years. A crucial factor in the respect Wall has incrementally won for his prose over this short time is the identifiable uniformities of his subjects. Even though they vary somewhat in style, Alice Falling (2000), Minding Children (2001) and The Map of Tenderness (2002) have all focused to a significant degree on the domestic social unit, something Wall once underlined in an interview with this paper: “I’m fascinated by the way families disintegrate. It can happen so easily; the bonds that hold people together are so obscure. And the idea that blood is ticker than water is rubbish.” His baneful take on the Irish family, his fundamentally anti-idyllic mood, have not enirely endeared Wall to the more misty-eyed among his readers at home or abroad. / With an echo at its very end of the rejected blood-versus-water imperative, This is The Country sustains both the core mood and theme that Wall has established as his mètier. We are in perhaps even more comprehensively sinister country this time. [...; for full text, see infra.]

Fiona Sampson, review of Water and Power, in The Irish Times (19 Feb. 2005), Weekend, p.10. ‘[...] In Fahrenheit Says Nothing To Me, William Wall [...] gives us the poet struggling to read all that’s incomprehensible in the world today. And throughout this volume reading, or paying attention, stand-in for attempted engagement with that world: “Reading in poor light / errors accumulate / I see things that have / only a tenuous presence / and closer to home / I miss the numinous” (‘Postcards from the Inferno’). / However, Wall is a poet in love with both language and the world which generates it: “On sullen summer days / light comes out of another world” (‘The Coming of Fire to Ireland’); elsewhere, damselflies are “neon”. In the end sense-making, like poem-building, requires tenacity, “the tentative pilotage of living with ourselves” (‘The Old Venetian Lighthouse on Cephalonia’). If there’s occasionally a slight foreshortening in the line of its lyric and metaphysical thought, in this substantial volume Wall [...] is nevertheless conscious of his responsibilities as poet at a time when (as he says in ‘Trayer for Riding in Front’: “The omens are not good”.)’

Todd McEwen, review of This is the Country, in The Guardian (25 June 2005): ‘Call it the stuff of ITV drama, of thrillers, but there is an unnecessary melodrama to this book. William Wall is a genuine literary talent, with a poet’s gift for apposite, wry observation, dialogue and character. To his credit he hangs his talents lightly on a nervous little plot about a man escaping drugs, losing his wife to gangsters, therefore losing his daughter to the social services, and plotting to get her back. None of this is needed, for This Is the Country is a masterful, ironic book of loss and bitter optimism, money and poverty, the impossible divide between city and country. [... The title] becomes a more and more resonant title as the book progresses: in the end Wall gives us a cleverly wrapped précis of modern Ireland, the problems inherent to its new-found wealth and leisure (and what is happening to those who can't participate in that), old class and religious divisions. The title begins as a kind of mantra, something the city chancer fleeing into the “bogs” keeps telling himself as he adjusts to a different, frightening, self-reliant way of life, and ends up meaning “this is the state of my nation”. [... &c.]’ (See full-text copy in RICORSO Library > Criticism > Reviews - via index or as attached.)

George O’Brien, ‘Getting to the point of surrender’, review of William Wall, No Paradiso, in The Irish Times (12 Aug. 2006), Weekend: ‘[...]It’s in the formal inventiveness with which this dynamic is handled that the reader will find No Paradiso most distinctive and most rewarding. In addition to the author’s alert, muscular style, his painlessly communicated appreciation of obscure learning, his vaguely didactic pleasure in accurately providing a sense of place, many of these stories are distinguished by a welcome engagement with form. The “strange geometry” of the final setting in “Surrender” is reproduced in the many variations of approach and perspective contained in No Paradiso. [... &c.].’(See full-text copy in RICORSO Library > Criticism > Reviews - via index or as attached.)

Eileen Battersby, ‘Unsettling fictions’ [review of Hearing Voices, Seeing Things], in The Irish Times (18 June 2016): ‘Living is a difficult business and an ongoing seepage of random information. Personal histories gradually take shape, some through a series of tedious small events and disappointments, others by a crisis. Not that every crisis results in a tragedy, but William Wall prefers the nagging doubts and the potential minefield created by the half-told tale. / Most of all, though, is the remorse and guilt and complex shared experiences alluded to by a random comment. / Wall, who was Man Booker-longlisted for This is the Country in 2005, knows less is more. These 20 short stories are both laconic and verbose; they hiss, mutter, wink and soar with intent. This resonant little book is in fact very large indeed.’ (See full-text copy in RICORSO Library > Criticism > Reviews - via index or as attached.)

Sue Leonard [catches up with William Wall], ‘I couldn’t write same book twice and I wouldn’t want to’, interview article in Irish Examiner (20 May 2017): ‘“I’m an atheist. I don’t believe in ghosts, but when I was writing The Map of Tenderness I could feel my parent’s presence hovering over the book. It was very strange. / “I had a long conversation with a friend, just recently, who told me a story which I really want to write. I asked her if she was going to use it, because you can’t go appropriating the story of another writer; not when they already have a voice.” And that is the aspect of the conundrum that Wall concentrates on in The Islands. The emotionally charged novel is narrated in the alternating first person voices of Grace and Jeannie. And Grace, a fledgling writer, isn’t at all happy with her father’s version of events. / Utterly different, the two sisters keep separate secrets, and see their lives in disparate ways. The third sister, who is not given a voice, shows us yet another side to their pseudo-idyllic lives. / “The stories are primarily focused on Grace and Jeannie, and how they cope so differently with their absent father. Grace has suffered very badly, but at the end of the day she comes to terms with it.” / Wall has captured the female voice to perfection, and has those awkward hormonal emotions of a teenage girl down to a tee. That can’t have come easily? / “While we share common humanity, there are things that are unknowable. So, at its best, it’s what a man thinks a woman’s voice will be. But Liz, my wife, is an excellent reader and editor. I rely on her to put me right where I’ve gone wrong.’ [Read online.]

See also Pittsburgh U announcement of the Drue Heinz Literature Award, 2017 - online.

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Quotations

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Notes
Drue Heinz Award 2017 (Pittsburgh Univ. Press): William Wall of Cork City, Ireland, won the Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing of $1,000 for his novel excerpt in Prairie Schooner’s Winter issue. David Gates, a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1992, selected Mr. Walls’ manuscript “The Islands”; from more than 300 submissions. “The Islands” is evocative, moving yet tough-minded, written with marvelous style and authority,” Mr. Gates said in a release. ‘After just the first few sentences, we trust absolutely that this writer is in control and knows what he’s doing. The narratives move expeditiously, even when they’re thick with description, and the characters’ voices are distinct and convincing. It was a pleasure to read.. “The Islands,” which features a series of related short stories centered on the lives of two sisters, details a family spiraling out of control. Through three stages of the girls’ lives, Mr. Wall traces their stories on three islands - one in southwest Ireland, one in southern England and one in the Bay of Naples. The University of Pittsburgh Press will publish “The Islands” later this year. The literary award also includes a $15,000 cash prize. ‘I’ve never been to the U.S.A. and I can’t think of a better way to make my first trip,’ Mr. Wall said in a release. ‘I’m hoping it brings my writing to a wider audience.’ (See Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 26 Jan. 2017 - online; accessed 29.01.2017.)

Kith & Kin: William Wall’s wife Liz Kirwan is a mathematician and author of the portrait-photo of him; a son is living in Oxford in 1017.

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