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All Just

David Herd

All Just
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Categories: 21st Century
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
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(Pub. Oct 2012)
9781847776723
£9.95 £8.96
Paperback (75 pages)
(Pub. Jul 2012)
9781847771636
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  • 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
    David Herd is a poet, critic and teacher. He has given readings and lectures in Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, the USA and the UK, and his poems, essays and reviews have been widely published in magazines, journals and newspapers. His collections of poetry include All Just (Carcanet, 2012) and Outwith (Bookthug, ... read more
    'In an era in which the relationship between poetry and politics is rarely subtle, the quiet but insistent linguistic and thematic complexities of All Just carry a rare quality and one that mark it out as that rare thing in the poetry marketplace: an important collection.'
    Nikolai Duffy, The Literateur
    'The difficulty of knowing "where one stands" both in space and affect, whether it requires particularising or details, whether one can choose where one stands, is perhaps the condition of being modern and is explored in All Just in a way that is resonant and haunting.'
    Ann Vickery, Mascara
    Praise for David Herd    '...a tour de force display of wit and technique, terrific poem after terrific poem.'
    Poetry Review
      'a dizzy and disorienting chain of teasing, clever, breezy challenging, ingratiating, and infuriating poems...there are many poems here that will put a spring in your step, and make your mind dance.'
    Tower Poetry
    'jumbled and energetic, discursive or elliptical, chatty or terse, provocative but playful, haphazard but probing.'
    The Times
    'A scintillating first collection of poems.'
    Scotland on Sunday
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