by Hunter Larson

How do we negotiate our work as poets within the context of the everyday cruelty of the state and the radical violence of being a citizen in a nation? What does transcendence look like in modernity? At one point in human history poetry was a truly sacred and profane act, the space in which cosmic drives might enter through language. One of the challenges for poets now is to push into that space, even as we are confronted by the unyielding sublimation of our art via its relation to capital and the state. There is a certain necessity in looking both internally and externally at the ways in which the work of poetry is bent and distorted by its relationship to the larger apparatuses and systems that govern our lives. How poets live and work in the world now, the variegated ways in which we engage with the political, what we let into the work, and what we leave out. In David Herd’s Walk Song, we understand  that ‘the emotion was political’. So if only emotion endures, as Pound would have us believe, then so too does the political always endure. The braiding of interior landscape and the landscape of the state is an inexorable phenomenon forever linked to the work of poetry. But what does it mean now to write a poetry that is inherently ‘political’? Who is it for? When does a poem become less a poem and more of a slogan, and what is the efficacy of the political invective in a time in which we are mentally subjugated by the endless scroll, the ticker tape of the algorithm? And where does the lyric fit into all of this? 

I would posit Herd’s Walk Song as an example of effective political poetry. It acknowledges its limits, and the limits of the lyric mode to effect physical change, and in doing so frees itself up to do the kind of psychic work that good poetry can do—it gives shape and form to the human condition. It’s soul-work. It comes to its politics organically because the poem is functionally a reflection of Herd’s life as an activist, namely his work with the Refugee Tales project, which Herd co-organizes: ‘a project aligned with the work of the Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group, sharing the stories of those held in immigration detention’. (Piette) The poems themselves contain a litany of commitments and exchanges; it’s a poetry that is organically composed out of the circumstances of its composer, as he writes in ‘Letter to a Friend’: ‘We traded poetry / For politics / Like people / Woven through a city / Following the syntax / Home.’ A great achievement of Walk Song is its ability to navigate this question of political efficacy, to not compromise lyric integrity and break into platitude or didacticism, but to let the complexity of the lyric work as vessel for an interrogation of border, state, country, capital. It understands history itself as the walk song: the trajectories of people, story, culture, and myth that make up ‘the new geography’ that Herd is attempting to articulate through the lyric mode. It’s a humane poetry, and as you read it you can feel the poet there walking beside you, a reminder that we’re in this thing together, that there is solidarity in the act of walking, of moving from place to place, story to story. 

A remarkable formal feature of Walk Song is its adherence to cadence, to attune its rhythms to the walk, the melody of the walk, a kind of constant turning out, or as Herd writes, ‘Waiting as the language / Turned’. In short, capitalized lines, Herd finds a form that is capable of folding in both lyric brilliance and sharp critique of the state. The tempo of the book is steady throughout, functioning like a guide, almost meditative in its progression; in other words, it wants you to get where it’s going too. The collection brings to mind another recent book that approaches the political with nuance and rigor, Joey Yearous-Algozin’s A Feeling Called Heaven, where the poems take on the tenor of a guided meditation as Yearous-Algozin leads the reader through an exploration of what comes after us, a soft meditation on humanity’s dissolution. But in Herd’s case, the poem’s voice is deeply embodied, where Yearous-Algozin’s voice is airy, kind of floating away, able to ‘ bob in the light breeze / traveling across a world / emptied of our presence’ (Yearous-Algozin), Herd’s is on the ground, passing by not the artifacts of this world but the lived in components of it, ‘Bearing geography / As political fact.’ (Herd)

You can feel this in the music of the line too, its movement is lucid and stable; it’s a poetry that knows where it’s headed, what’s at stake when it gets there. ‘And I think you laid / The bird song / Bare’ he writes, as if to break bird song down into its constituent parts, raw music, pure sound. I’ve heard it said that birds were the first poets, and Herd is acutely aware of this fact, as he is also aware that just as birds don’t sing into a vacuum, neither do poets. When Herd writes ‘Against all the instruments / Of the state / Laid down / Against the grass’ I suddenly imagine Whitman ‘loafing and inviting the soul’, laid down against that same grass, eyeing both the instruments of the state but also ‘the tree line / Burnt / In its image’. I hear the music of other poets throughout Walk Song, ‘That we come back to the geography of it’ (Olson), ‘Smale foweles maken melodye’ (Chaucer), ‘But plainly as the discourse / Surrounds us’ (Creeley), ‘These trees are backlit’ (Ashbery)—Herd’s is a poetics shot through with lineage and influence, and this embrace of the poetry of his life allows him to reckon with both the landscape and language of the state via his own devotion to the art—that ancient tool incompatible with the cold artificial wiring of the state. Herd both acknowledges and extends this notion of lineage, reworking and folding in these references—establishing not authority but solidarity. 

This is a voice that privileges the connective power of the lyric, its ability to regenerate, revivify. Herd’s lyric mimics life, breath, the body in space, moving, walking, thinking, commingling with the landscape. ‘The walk / Is an act’ he reminds us, just as the poem is an act of speech, and a declaration of law is an act of control. Perhaps the real generosity of Herd’s work is that it is a reminder that great poetry can ‘[teach] us how to name / The violence’ and that, maybe, if we pause for a minute, there will be time enough for a little song, ‘Moving forwards / Carrying the language / Back’.

Works Cited

Piette, Adam. “Blackbox Manifold - Adam Piette Reviews Andrea Brady, David Herd, Jay Gao, Philip Terry.” blackboxmanifold.sites.sheffield.ac.uk/issues/issues-21-28/issue-28/adam-piette-reviews-andrea-brady-david-herd-jay-gao-philip-terry. Accessed 11 Dec. 2025.

Yearous-Algozin, Joey. A Feeling Called Heaven. Nightboat Books, 2021.