All Just

by David Herd

All Just, David Herd's second Carcanet collection, makes poems from the fractured phrases and competing idioms of contemporary movement, its translations between public and private spaces. Conversations start and are broken off. Public announcements intervene in private situations. In the background, an emergency is about to unfold. Taking bearings from Dover and London, from elegy and protest, from official structures that determine where people can go, and the futures that cross them, All Just explores the social spaces in which we all move. It asks what it means to be at large in the world, and what language we have to document the journey.

Genres: Poetry

90 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

David Herd is a poet, critic, and teacher. His collections of poetry include All Just (Carcanet 2012), Outwith (Bookthug 2012), and Through (Carcanet 2016), and his recent writings on the politics of human movement have appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, Parallax and Almost Island. He is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Kent, has worked with Kent Refugee Help since 2009, and is a coordinator of Refugee Tales.