‘There are the Alps’, wrote Basil Bunting of Pound's Cantos : ‘you will have to go a long way round / if you want to avoid them’. For Irish poets at mid-century, no less than for the Northumbrian Bunting, modernism proved an unavoidable massif – even, or perhaps especially, when they wrote out of a sceptical or even antagonistic response to it, as in the cases of Padraic Fallon and Austin Clarke. More recently, certain Irish poets one would scarcely identify with a Poundian ‘Other Tradition’ have engaged more profitably with modernism than Fallon and Clarke, as in Seamus Heaney's ventriloquism of Joyce in the closing section of ‘Station Island’, and Derek Mahon's recurrent return to the scene of the modern by means of his evocation of ‘the Men of 1914’ in ‘A Kensington Notebook’, The Golden Bough in ‘The Last of the Fire Kings’, an avant-garde precursor in ‘An Image from Beckett’ and, more generally, the exilic preoccupations of ‘Ovid in Tomis’. Such ‘citation’ of modernism, however, stands in marked contrast to the late modernist practice one finds in the work of certain contemporary Irish poets who, in various ways, have chosen to position their work in the slipstream of the stylistic experimentation of high modernism, including Trevor Joyce, Geoffrey Squires, Maurice Scully, Billy Mills and Catherine Walsh. In this chapter, I read the poetry of David Lloyd as illustrating a similarly productive appropriation of earlier modernist praxes, as distinct from the thematically significant deployment of modernist topoi one witnesses in, for example, Mahon and Heaney.

In the early 1950s, Padraic Fallon contributed a ‘Journal’ to The Bell : a series of candid and, on occasion, caustic commentaries on recent and contemporary poetry. In an entry dated 8 December 1951, he writes: