David Herd 
Through 

The poems in Throug 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’.

About the author

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, 2012), and his recent writings on the politi 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 and a co-organiser of Refugee Tales.