"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.
DAVID HERD is a poet, critic and teacher. He was born in 1967 and lives in Kent, where he lectures at the Univeristy of Kent, Canterbury. Carcanet published his first collection, Mandelson! Mandelson! A Memoir, in 2005. His recent essays on poetry and politics have appeared in PN Review, Parallax and Almost Island. He is the author of a monograph on the work of John Ashbery.
3 a.m. Sans papiers To the historians - a letter Outwith On not being a man who is Piero della Francesca On not being a man who is Piero (out set) And Piero, a further word Song of the road Poem beginning with a phrase from Whitman Song of the cigarette For a friend, after a translation 3 notes towards a love song Fact Song of the mobile 3 poems becoming elegy You among Ecology Ecology (out set) Bric-a-brac Where things stand One by one Song of the sea Song of the passing truck Simon's bag Objective song Some woman pressed Some woman pressed (out set) To a friend, after a word by Charles Olson The hearing Song of the ultimatum Somehow it seems Song of the stewards Show and tell Song of the breath We do this, we do that Some details maybe A footnote to the American constitution Deportment Song of the cart They offered me a television. I offered them a phone. Some might call it shopping Four poems by way of document Letter to the Corinthians Fugue Document Acknowledgements
'David Herd is a poet worth paying close attention to.'Tower Poetry '[...] In the tangle of poetics and politics, Herd notes that language 'can't very well articulate that which it doesn't already discern.' Legislation such as the National Defense Authorization Act in the United States or Law 78 (severely limiting the freedom of assembly and expression) in Quebec are obvious attempts to expand the state of exception. This is the political arena of struggle now, between states increasingly seeking the invisibility, dis-placement, and inarticulacy of dissent, and between new social movements working networks of expressivity, using the 'placeless' internet to actually 'locate" each other, articulate discontent, and specifying the time and place to gather. Herd offers us a cognitive map of the spaces currently being erased.' - Stephen Collis, Jacket2
