The Harm Fields: Poems [Paperback]

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.David Lloyd’s poetry abides in a lineage of poetic modernism, often in dialogue with poets like César Vallejo, Paul Celan, and Mahmoud Darwish. The poems in The Harm Fields are rich in imagery, their language a fluent mix of registers, from colloquial idioms to technical language and literary citation, and replete with multilingual puns and portmanteaux. These poems carry forward the musical values and the questioning project of the modernist lyric, but their concerns are contemporary, haunted by the ongoing brutality of the times, from Ireland to Palestine, and reaching for a language adequate to mourning, persistence, and utopian possibility.A collection of poems whose intricate music resonates with the difficult matter of the worlds they addressSteadily, 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.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 l)