Letter to the Editor

Dear Editor,

To add to Clive James’s account of the influence of Ezra Pound among students in Sydney in the fifties, I can report that Pound was still prominent in the west of  Ireland two decades later. In Limerick, where I grew up, the link with Pound was partly circumstantial: our main local poet, Desmond O’Grady, had worked with Pound during the latter’s last years in Italy and therefore acted as a kind of broker for Pound’s presence. O’Grady regularly returned to Limerick from his home in the Mediterranean to read installments from his own Poundian projects. A picture of Pound still hangs in Limerick’s principal literary haunt, a pub known as the White House.