The Harm Fields

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.