To Occupy the Terms
David Herd, Through
Carcanet, 82pp, £9.99, ISBN 9781784102562
reviewed by Dan Barrow
What lies behind the one short and six long poems of David Herd's third collection are the crises that the last decade have precipitated in global migration flows. That is, the vast surge in the numbers of those fleeing civil war, resource conflict and economic collapse to other countries, the increasingly authoritarian and racist character of European and particularly British border regimes, the climate of public xenophobia that increasingly harasses migrants and their descendants, and the increasingly fraught and dangerous nature of passage. (Some recent headlines: 'Boris Johnson says immigration figures are scandalous,’ ‘Italian navy saves 550 refugees as smugglers' trawler capsizes in Med,’ ‘Greek riot police move in to clear refugee camp.’) Herd attempts to frame and explore, in texts whose tone and syntax is at once smooth and stuttering, the barbaric strangeness of all this, from somewhere alternately outside and within the experience of those subjected to it.
This is a project that has the potential to fail. The point that the imposition of such conditions rests on semantics – whether someone is a 'refugee' or an 'economic migrant', the presence or absence of requisite papers, the arbitrary and brutal nature of bureaucratic wording – could easily become congruent with the kinds of discreet tubthumping that writers (and social media commentators) tend to specialise in.
Language, no matter how it's deformed and devalued by the state and its sock puppets in the press, isn't the same as the ‘real abstractions’ (to use the Marxist philosopher Alberto Toscano's term) – the mute, degrading and all too material violence meted out to migrants in the name of the nation-state – that people think they're addressing when they engage in self-designated deconstructions of media narratives, a smug form of rhetoric to which Through worryingly tends at moments. The opening text, 'Who Leaves The Language', reads like an extension of the blurb to Through which, with its talk of how ‘contemporary public language has been rendered officially hostile,’ signposts its intent with the empty facility of an REF statement.
If Herd swerves thereafter to a richer and stranger place, it has something to do, as the title Through suggests, with the poems' mobility of perspective. In the title sequence and 'Feedback' in particular, the lines' glassy, implacable momentum is displaced or cracked by linebreaks that arrive just after the beginning of a new sentence, or by a shift between lines to a new sentence unmarked by punctuation, or by an implicit change of addressee. At its best Through presents a poetry of encounter, in which the registers of the everyday – ‘The tree opposite/Across a wooden table/Accumulating books,’ ‘a poem about Margate,’ ‘Sirens. Cigarettes.’ – philosophical analysis and political abstraction clash by night. The ambiguous, slightly stilted grammar of occasional lines – for example, from the title poem: ‘Only the phone equal/To the next spike/Blond euphoric/And so the names roll back/San Diego, Margate,/Margate, Kent’ – reads as a way of negotiating the uneven and vaguely unreal geography of the experiences they cover. For Herd attempts here not only to write about the emergency that governments have turned migration into but the larger setting that sets off the emergency – of landscape and traditions and practices of living and reading.
Herd dramatises this most effectively in the six page-long prose text 'The Archaeology of Walking', where he also comes closest to an unelaborated, straightforward, unoblique style. The poem looks closely at the landscape around Canterbury, an area at once central to a certain touristic Englishness and to the British border regime. (The Dover Immigration Removal Centre, based until November 2015 at the old Napoleonic fort on the Kent coast nearby, was one of the main places where migrants were held indefinitely without trial, a practice that continues in other detention centres. Herd is co-organiser of Refugee Tales, a project that collects and performs in public spaces the stories of those so detained.) If this sort of politics-through-topography approach verges on the merely fashionable – everything for which the culture industry has now made the term ‘psychogeography’ a meaningless receptacle – Herd's text avoids this fate through its combination of close attention, hesitancy and pathos. The rhetorical architecture shifts from sentence to sentence, sometimes from clause to clause:
There's a real dynamism here as a direct result of, rather than despite, its meta (even theoretical) quality: sentences switch between very different structures and diction because each one doesn't seem to trust its ability to bring forth some real, unrecuperable insight. It's the very plainness of the style here, with technical terms wrapped in a frame of everyday reference and the low, unemphatic motion of the sentence, that brings out the very freshness, the glittering oddity of Herd's thought. Practices of naming – ‘when I say politics I mean poetics’ – become an occluded and disenchanted frame for the supremely provisional question of belonging of whom, as Herd has put it elsewhere, ‘gets left outside of the language’: ‘Naming things as they went, walking by chasteyn, lynde, laurer, maple, thon, bech, so that the geography of it framed the terms, not like any über narrative, but just like walking through it and picking things out, comprehending syntax as an effect of space.’ It's in this roving sense of poetry as process and survival that we encounter little glimpses of collectivity: ‘To include this as polis so what we occupy is syntax.’
This is a project that has the potential to fail. The point that the imposition of such conditions rests on semantics – whether someone is a 'refugee' or an 'economic migrant', the presence or absence of requisite papers, the arbitrary and brutal nature of bureaucratic wording – could easily become congruent with the kinds of discreet tubthumping that writers (and social media commentators) tend to specialise in.
Language, no matter how it's deformed and devalued by the state and its sock puppets in the press, isn't the same as the ‘real abstractions’ (to use the Marxist philosopher Alberto Toscano's term) – the mute, degrading and all too material violence meted out to migrants in the name of the nation-state – that people think they're addressing when they engage in self-designated deconstructions of media narratives, a smug form of rhetoric to which Through worryingly tends at moments. The opening text, 'Who Leaves The Language', reads like an extension of the blurb to Through which, with its talk of how ‘contemporary public language has been rendered officially hostile,’ signposts its intent with the empty facility of an REF statement.
If Herd swerves thereafter to a richer and stranger place, it has something to do, as the title Through suggests, with the poems' mobility of perspective. In the title sequence and 'Feedback' in particular, the lines' glassy, implacable momentum is displaced or cracked by linebreaks that arrive just after the beginning of a new sentence, or by a shift between lines to a new sentence unmarked by punctuation, or by an implicit change of addressee. At its best Through presents a poetry of encounter, in which the registers of the everyday – ‘The tree opposite/Across a wooden table/Accumulating books,’ ‘a poem about Margate,’ ‘Sirens. Cigarettes.’ – philosophical analysis and political abstraction clash by night. The ambiguous, slightly stilted grammar of occasional lines – for example, from the title poem: ‘Only the phone equal/To the next spike/Blond euphoric/And so the names roll back/San Diego, Margate,/Margate, Kent’ – reads as a way of negotiating the uneven and vaguely unreal geography of the experiences they cover. For Herd attempts here not only to write about the emergency that governments have turned migration into but the larger setting that sets off the emergency – of landscape and traditions and practices of living and reading.
Herd dramatises this most effectively in the six page-long prose text 'The Archaeology of Walking', where he also comes closest to an unelaborated, straightforward, unoblique style. The poem looks closely at the landscape around Canterbury, an area at once central to a certain touristic Englishness and to the British border regime. (The Dover Immigration Removal Centre, based until November 2015 at the old Napoleonic fort on the Kent coast nearby, was one of the main places where migrants were held indefinitely without trial, a practice that continues in other detention centres. Herd is co-organiser of Refugee Tales, a project that collects and performs in public spaces the stories of those so detained.) If this sort of politics-through-topography approach verges on the merely fashionable – everything for which the culture industry has now made the term ‘psychogeography’ a meaningless receptacle – Herd's text avoids this fate through its combination of close attention, hesitancy and pathos. The rhetorical architecture shifts from sentence to sentence, sometimes from clause to clause:
Ach. Those songs. Sometimes when I say poetics I mean politics. There's nothing complicated about it, watching the direction of travel, taking a decision to occupy the terms, since this is where the language takes shape and even as we use it we issue a new demand, outwith, registering the reality that we in [sic] are in fact the polis. Tasked with space. … I don't blame Kenneth Goldsmith exactly but I want a language that gets how day follows journey, how movement through a landscape produces space. So that as they came down the hill after stopping in Harbledown, transformed by many and a history of talk, not one was refused and not one was unaffected and at the threshold they stopped and then they waved through.
There's a real dynamism here as a direct result of, rather than despite, its meta (even theoretical) quality: sentences switch between very different structures and diction because each one doesn't seem to trust its ability to bring forth some real, unrecuperable insight. It's the very plainness of the style here, with technical terms wrapped in a frame of everyday reference and the low, unemphatic motion of the sentence, that brings out the very freshness, the glittering oddity of Herd's thought. Practices of naming – ‘when I say politics I mean poetics’ – become an occluded and disenchanted frame for the supremely provisional question of belonging of whom, as Herd has put it elsewhere, ‘gets left outside of the language’: ‘Naming things as they went, walking by chasteyn, lynde, laurer, maple, thon, bech, so that the geography of it framed the terms, not like any über narrative, but just like walking through it and picking things out, comprehending syntax as an effect of space.’ It's in this roving sense of poetry as process and survival that we encounter little glimpses of collectivity: ‘To include this as polis so what we occupy is syntax.’