Counterpoetics of Modernity - by David Lloyd

About the Book

Provides a new approach to contemporary Irish poetry.

Book Synopsis

This study puts contemporary Irish poetry in dialogue with major debates and concerns of European and American poetics. David Lloyd tracks the traits of Irish poetic modernism, from fragmentation to the suspicion of representation, to nineteenth-century responses to the rapid and unsettling effects of Ireland's precocious colonial modernity, such as language loss and political violence. He argues that Irish poetry's inventiveness is driven by the need to find formal means to engage with historical conditions that take from the writer the customary certainties of cultural continuity, identity and aesthetic or personal autonomy, rather than by poetic innovation for its own sake. This reading of Irish poetry understands the innovative impetus that persists through Irish poetry since the nineteenth century as a counterpoetics of modernity. Opening with chapters on Mangan and Yeats, the book then turns to detailed discussions of Trevor Joyce, Maurice Scully, and Catherine Walsh; major Irish contemporary poets never before the focus of a book-length study.

From the Back Cover

A new approach to contemporary Irish poetry This study puts contemporary Irish poetry in dialogue with major debates and concerns of European and American poetics. David Lloyd tracks the traits of Irish poetic modernism, from fragmentation to the suspicion of representation, in nineteenth-century responses to the rapid and unsettling effects of Ireland's precocious colonial modernity, such as language loss and political violence. He argues that Irish poetry's inventiveness is driven by the need to find formal means to engage with historical conditions that take from the writer the customary certainties of cultural continuity, identity and aesthetic or personal autonomy, rather than by poetic innovation for its own sake. This reading of Irish poetry understands the innovative impetus that persists through Irish poetry since the nineteenth century as a counterpoetics of modernity. Opening with chapters on Mangan and Yeats, the book then turns to detailed discussions of Trevor Joyce, Maurice Scully, and Catherine Walsh: major Irish contemporary poets never before the focus of a book-length study. David Lloyd is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. His most recent books are Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics (2019) and Beckett's Thing: Theatre and Painting (Edinburgh University Press, 2016).

Review Quotes

Lloyd's treatment of often overlooked poets and their influence is profound. Counterpoints of Modernity is a major contribution to scholarship of Irish poetry.
Summing Up: Essential.

--D. W. Madden, emeritus, California State University "CHOICE"

Counterpoetics of Modernity represents a significant contribution to our understandings of not just contemporary Irish poetry but also of modernism itself. It undermines the sense of both a givenness and a homogeneity within modernist literature, its sensibilities and implications. This book is at once the kind of close reading we are used to but it is also impressively expansive - taking up Irish poetry of the 1930s, contemporary Irish poetry, and Irish poetry from as far back as James Clarence Mangan and the first half of the 19th Century. Yet it remains incise, thorough, coherent, suasive.--Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem "Irish Studies Review"

Counterpoetics of Modernity represents a significant contribution to our understandings of not just contemporary Irish poetry but also of modernism itself. It undermines the sense of both a givenness and a homogeneity within modernist literature, its sensibilities and implications. This book is at once the kind of close reading we are used to but it is also impressively expansive - taking up Irish poetry of the 1930s, contemporary Irish poetry, and Irish poetry from as far back as James Clarence Mangan and the first half of the 19th Century. Yet it remains incise, thorough, coherent, suasive.

--Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem "Irish Studies Review"

In its adoption and recasting of Édouard Glissant's notion of a counter or forced poetics as an alternative to the frequently anodyne critical conceptions of Irish modernism, Lloyd's study constitutes a groundbreaking account and authoritative re-evaluation of innovative Irish poetries from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century.

--Alex Davis, University College Cork

The new things that happen happen somewhere, not nowhere, and that which is counter, is counter to some specific set of circumstances. Lloyd's great strength here is to bring out into the light of critical examination the specifics of a distinctly Irish counterpoetics. ...in a book that I believe will be seen as a key moment in our understanding of what is most vital in Irish poetry.

--Billy Mills "Elliptical Movements"

[...] a book that I believe will be seen as a key moment in our understanding of what is most vital in Irish poetry.--Billy Mills "Elliptical Movements"

About the Author

David Lloyd is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. His most recent books are Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics (2019) and Beckett's Thing: Theatre and Painting (Edinburgh University Press, 2016).