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A collection of poems whose intricate music resonates with the difficult matter of the worlds they address

About the Author

DAVID LLOYD is the Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. Among his many publications are Arc & Sill: Poems 1979–2009; Beckett’s Thing: Painting and Theatre; Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics; and Counterpoetics of Modernity: On Irish Poetry and Modernism. His play, The Press/Le Placard, is available in a bilingual edition from Presses Universitaires du Midi.

Reviews

Steadily, unshrinkingly, David Lloyd’s The Harm Fields confronts the harsh outlines of what remains after atrocity. Tenderly, these poems sound out the dividedness of diasporic being. Historic wounds, here debrided, are opened to air, water and lapidary attention.
*author of Curious Disciplines: Mina Loy and Avant-Garde Artisthood*

For decades now, David Lloyd has been quietly crafting exquisitely chiseled poems that reveal ‘the grain of the stone’: a lapidary weave of dense internal rhymes; an obdurate and unflinching critical thought; a poetic sensibility that understands why Basil Bunting demanded a chisel to write. The resulting poems—lithographies of the political imagination—weight bodies to particular places and voices to particular bodies. Every tone is telling.
*author of Radium of the Word: A Poetics of Materiality*

Over the past four decades, David Lloyd’s poetry has garnered many admirers—readers drawn to its formal innovation, its wit and intelligence, and its controlled yet deeply committed political engagements. . . . The sheer inventiveness of this now considerable oeuvre—one that is disorientating and exhilarating in equal measure—has few analogues in recent Irish poetry.
*author of Origins of Modern Irish Poetry, 1880-1922*

First comes a kind of prelude, a prose consideration of language, identity, belonging, history, that grows up and out from local Irish and European origins. Then comes the cold, clear note of the poetry, and there is no point at which this isn't poetry. Once launched, it never hesitates, to explain itself or to doubt its own adequacy, it just moves. Material images dominate the verse, but their gravity is lightened by a play of relations made possible by an exactitude of sound, image, and echo that 'sing / out from the nought rim spelling / with numbers'. This play of relations joins a complex and intimate colloquy of Darwish and Celan, Fred Moten and Wu Tsang, inviting us to come close and listen. 'A sheer / wind sings in the breach'. There is a deep comfort in a language so inhabited, but it is not an easy one.
*author of Courts of Air and Earth*

People will say it is difficult but it has a true, necessary difficulty. There is, I think, an overall sense of loss, disappearance, absence. But what really strikes me is a certain kind of consciousness or being which negotiates the physical and the human equally. Someone said of Merleau, I think, that he found ways of expressing the human in physical terms, but here the reverse is true too. So, yes, lyric, I think, but not as it is usually construed.
*author of Poem at the turn of the year*