All Just

Overview

The poems in this collection are created from the fractured phrases and competing idioms of contemporary movement and the translation between public and private spaces—conversations that start and are broken off; public announcements intervening in private situations; an emergency that is about to unfold in the background. Taking bearings from Dover and London and wrestling with themes of elegy and protest, official structures that determine where people can go, and the futures that cross them, the poems explore the social spaces in which people move. The book asks what it means to be at large in the world and what language is available to document the journey.

Reviews

"Jumbled and energetic, discursive or elliptical, chatty or terse, provocative but playful, haphazard but probing."  —Times

"A dizzy and disorienting chain of teasing, clever, breezy challenging, ingratiating, and infuriating poems."  —Tower Poetry

Author Biography

David Herd is a poet, a critic, and a teacher. He is a lecturer at the University of Kent and the author of Mandleson! Mandleson! A Memoir. His recent essays on poetry and politics have appeared in publications such as Almost Island, Parallax, and PN Review.