All Just

by David Herd

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.

Genres: Poetry

81 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.