Today is pale. I’d like to make
An intervention now please. Across
The city the traffic never stops
When the winds blow and the seas
And the small rain arbitrates the
Process and the waiting continues
And the watching, I’d like to interrupt.


from ‘Feedback (6)’

The poems in Through resume David Herd’s inquiry into the language of public space taken up in All Just (2012). Here, five extended texts address the ways in which contemporary public language has been rendered officially hostile. Considering the risks that such official hostility poses to human intimacy, Through sets out to register broken affections, to re-explore possibilities of solidarity and trust. Countering the enclosures of public discourse, the poems embrace instead ‘a language in transition’, one in which meaning is multiple, ‘echoing into place a genuine and subsisting relationship’.