Standing like an act
Like a person present
Sometimes sure sometimes
Likewise limited
Standing still and waiting
While the commons shifts.

from ‘Four poems by way of document’

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.

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