This is the cover of my debut novel - due out on March 2023 with Seven Stories Press (aye, the ones who do Che Guevara, Kurt Vonnegut and the marvellous Annie Ernaux - I am out of my depth here).
The novel is about a shoplifter, a wee girl who can't cope with her mother's death, who nearly knocks Jesus into the Lancaster Canal with her bike. Here's the blurb:
A grieving, spirited, and often in trouble teenage girl named Orla McDevitt meets a man called Jesus who can raise the dead in this stunning debut novel about family, faith, and loss by an acclaimed Northern Irish poet.
Fourteen-year-old Orla’s mum is dead. She lives in England with her unemployed father and baby sister Lily, but she’s planning to run away to live in Northern Ireland, where her mother is buried. Preoccupied with trouble at home and at school, she accidentally crashes her bike into a man who calls himself Jesus and says he is the Son of God. He has never seen a smartphone. He can raise animals from the dead by blowing into their mouths, including Orla’s cat Sneaky.
Orla convinces Jesus to come with her to Ireland to bring her mum back to life and she teaches him how to ride a bike to get there. But Jesus has plans of his own, and after one of his revivals goes horribly wrong, Orla must decide how far she is willing to go to save her mother. A hilarious coming-of-age story, road novel, and meditation on the mysteries of faith and grief, this debut novel heralds an important new voice in world literature.
It is curently available for preorder in many of the usual places - including here - and I will no doubt do more publicity around ti when the time comes.
Thought Poems - my translation of Heidegger's poetry - came out last year - and the paperback version (much more reasonably priced) is out next March. Here's the cover. I know the price is high - so if you are a fan of Heidegger, or rather, if you would be intrigued to read his poetry but have limited German, it could be worth a look. If it is too expensive, a research library might have the budget to buy one in (that's how I generally get academic books). It's available at this website if you don't like Amazon, and this is what the American research resource Choice had to say about my translation.
Walls's translation of Heidegger's Thought Poems (Gedachtes) will prove to be the most authoritative and illuminating commentary on and annotation to Heidegger's voluminous philosophical, discursive, and analytical work. Reducing grammar to a minimum and giving free rein to the circulation of antithetical, paradoxical, and resonant usages and neologisms, Heidegger delineates the central narrative of his thought: namely, the experience of language's ancient, primordial turning away from the will to overcome, away from pseudo-mastery of the imponderability of Being and rediscovering language's deep reserves, the signals (winke) that point to unthinkable traces marking destination-less paths that guide one from Being to the impasse of Beyng. Surging from an earliness before all dawns and enduring later than all lateness, Gedachtes (neither Gedichte nor Denken) mines an underlying state of language that appropriates, claims (Ereignis) thinking for Seyn and holds Dasein, being there, within an inescapable ringing (Klang) of ancestral words that dispossess (Enteignis) thinking into the abyssal groundlessness most intimately our/its own. Recalling Hölderlin and Trakl, Heidegger's nichtende Nichts, the nullifying nothing, preserves rather than annihilates. Walls's magnificent translation utterly transforms Heidegger's legacy from here on. Essential. Graduate students, researchers, faculty.-- Choice, 2021
Pigeon Songs was launched in 2019. It has poems about miscarriage and immigration and fatherhood. Here's what some of the reviewers said.
Eoghan Walls’s Pigeon Songs is a reviewer’s (and any sensible reader’s) delight. It works through a dizzying richness of topics and motifs … The inventiveness of the collection is also marked by the fresh narratives that Walls offers.
David Malcolm, Poetry Salzburg Review, July 2020.
Walls is a master at creating resonant lines that catch the eye and the ear … The poems that reference family members do not descend into mere domesticity but carry with them an energy all of their own … The scope of the subject matter is astonishing
Neil Leadbeater in WriteOutLoud March 31, 2020
There’s impressive range in Pigeon Songs.Walls, it should not be doubted, has the ability to deeply conceive and map out such flights of imagination, and to offer them on the page with singular power.
Martin Dyar, Poetry Ireland Review, October 7, 2019
Formal metre and structure, by definition, don’t usually signify content that can flow free and wild. This is why Eoghan Walls’s Pigeon Songs is such a refreshing read. Its content, themes, tone and free word play are not what you might expect sitting within stanzas so formal. The juxtaposition of content and form give the reader a thrill.
Liam Nolan, Gwales, July 16, 2019
Here's a bit about my first collection.
Eoghan Walls was born in Derry, Northern Ireland. He won an Eric Gregory Award in 2006, an Irish Art's Council Bursary in 2009. His work has been published broadly in anthologies and journals; this is his first full length collection of poetry. It was shortlisted for the Short Award for Best First Collection in 2012.
The old world is finished, The Salt Harvest tells us, and I am terrified. From Derry to Drogheda to Eastern Europe and beyond, an aluminium angel with a frogsoul contemplates the meat and animals of a dry world darkening, probes starmatter in vain for limbo, titillates with leftover words like pray or sacrament in a negative baptism where nothing is funny as it used to be. A griefdappled dirgebook lifted alive by love from the water.
Medbh McGuickian