William Wall - Critical Response To His Work

Critical Response To His Work

Described by writer Kate Atkinson as "lyrical and cruel and bold and with metaphors to die for", critics have focused on Wall's mastery of language, his gift for "linguistic compression" his "poet's gift for apposite, wry observation, dialogue and character", his "unflinching frankness" and his "laser-like ... dissection of human frailties", which is counterbalanced by "the depth of feeling that Wall invests in his work". The New Yorker, in a review of his first novel, wrote that "Wall, who is also a poet, writes prose so charged—at once lyrical and syncopated—that it’s as if Cavafy had decided to write about a violent Irish household". In a recent review, his long poem Job In Heathrow, anthologised in The Forward Book of Poetry 2010 but originally published in The SHOp, was described as "a chilling airport dystopia". Poet Fred Johnston suggests that Wall's poetry sets out to "list the shelves of disillusion under which a thinking man can be buried" "His apocalyptic vision of the ecological demise of our planet is suffused with humility and resignation where the global catastrophe is transformed “into a universal truth / the days are shorter / today than yesterday”, according to Borbála Faragó. For Philip Coleman 'Ghost Estate is a deeply political book, but it also articulates a profound interest in and engagement with questions of aesthetics and poetics'.