John Ashbery is America's greatest living poet. He is also greatly misunderstood. For many he is the inheritor of and American tradition that includes Walt Whitman and Wallace Stevens. Yet for some he threatens the very future of poetry. He is a source of continuing inspiration for younger writers of all kinds. Yet he can still prompt startling hostility from reviewers. Lauded by admirers, baffling to detractors, Ashbery's achievement remains perplexingly great. "John Ashbery and American Poetry" takes this paradoxical state of affairs as its starting point. David Herd sets out to provide readers with a new critical language through which they can appreciate the beauty and complexity of Ashbery's writing. Presenting the poet in all his forms -avant-garde, nostalgic, sublime and camp - the book argues that the perpetual inventiveness of Ashbery's work has always been underpinned by the poets desire to write the poem fit to cope with its occasion. Tracing Ashbery's development in the light of this idea, and from its origins in the dazzling artistic environment of 1950's New York, the book evaluates his poetry against the aesthetic, literary and historical backgrounds that have informed it. Ashbery is identified as both an American pragmatist writing in the sprit of William James, and as committed literary internationalist learning from Boris Pasternak and the Russian avant-garde. His poetry is shown to be alive to such culturally defining issues as the growth of mass culture, the absence of a divine presence, the war in Vietnam, the emergence of AIDS, the erosion of tradition, and the decline of the avant-garde. His responses to such pressures are contrasted with the work of, among others, Robert Lowell, John Berryman Kenneth Koch, and Frank O'Hara. The story of a brilliant career, and a history of the period in which that career has taken shape, "John Ashbery and American Poetry" provides a compelling account of Ashbery's importance to Twentieth Century Literature.

Upon changing his religion, a young man is denounced as an apostate and flees his country hiding in the back of a freezer lorry... After years of travelling and losing almost everything - his country, his children, his wife, his farm - an Afghan man finds unexpected warmth and comfort in a stranger's home... A student protester is forced to leave his homeland after a government crackdown, and spends the next 25 years in limbo, trapped in the UK asylum system... Modelled on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the second volume of Refugee Tales sets out to communicate the experiences of those who, having sought asylum in the UK, find themselves indefinitely detained. Here, poets and novelists create a space in which the stories of those who have been detained can be safely heard, a space in which hospitality is the prevailing discourse and listening becomes an act of welcome.

As poet, critic, theorist and teacher, Charles Olson extended the possibilities of modern writing. From Call Me Ishmael, his pioneering study of Herman Melville, to his epic poetic project The Maximus Poems, Olson probed the relation between language, space and community. Writing in the aftermath of the Second World War, he provided radical resources for the re-imagining of place and politics, resources for collective thought and creative practice we are still learning how to use. Re-situating Olson's work in relation both to his own moment and to current concerns, the essays assembled in Contemporary Olson provide a major re-assessment of his place in postwar poetry and culture. Through a series of contextualising chapters, discussions of individual poems and reflections on Olson's legacy by leading international writers and critics, the book presents a poet who still informs contemporary poetry. -- .

Writing Against Expulsion in the Post-War World: Making Space for the Human tells a pre-history of the Hostile Environment. The book's starting point is the rapidly escalating use of detention as a response to human movement and the global production of geopolitical non-personhood in which detention results. As a matter of urgency, the book argues, we need to understand what is at stake in such policies and to resist the world we are making when we detain and expel. Writing Against Expulsion returns to a post-war period when the brutal consequences of the politics of expulsion were visible and when it was clear to writers of all kinds that space for the human had to be made. Drawing on contemporary histories of forced displacement, eye witness accounts, international legal documents, and on a range of emblematic cross-disciplinary texts and authors — the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt, the poetry of Charles Olson, the revolutionary theory of Frantz Fanon — the book shows how mid-century writers both documented the lived experience of expulsion and asserted ways of thinking and acting by which expulsion could be prevented. What emerged were new languages of rights and recognition — new accounts of Moving, Making and Speaking — through which the exclusions of nation and border could be countered.

Seventy years after the adoption of the 1951 Refugee Convention, the UK is guilty of undermining the very principles of asylum, inhumanely detaining those seeking protection and ushering in sweeping changes that threaten to punish refugees at every turn. But the UK’s immigration system is not alone in committing such breaches of human rights. The fourth volume of Refugee Tales explores our present international environment, combining author re-tellings with first-hand accounts of individuals who have been detained across the world. As the coronavirus pandemic defies borders – leaving those who are detained even more vulnerable – this collection shares stories spanning Canada, Greece, Italy, Switzerland and the UK, and calls for international insistence on a future without detention. Featuring a prologue by Baroness Shami Chakrabarti. The fourth volume in the Refugee Tales series, proceeds from the sales of which go to two refugee charities.

Written between 2015 and 2020, the poems of Walk Song build through a series of sequences which look to animate solidarities and the languages of rights. Taking their bearings from the Refugee Tales project, and always grounded in the collective walk, these are poems of friendship and move-ment, of landscape and politics, of action and hope. Addressing the environments we have made, the border and its hostilities, Walk Song sets out to picture settings in which the language might be opened, step by step. "David Herd opens his stunning new book by telling us that "it is an act of welcome." Walk Song is a most welcome addition to what we might call an advanced lyricism. A complex human song that touches all of us. The formal achievement of the line is everywhere manifest in this work. With grace and daring, Herd has written a gorgeous and generous and necessary book." -Peter Gizzi "Walk Song combines manifesto, mantra, lyric poem in a mode of address that ranges from militant to tender to transcendent. Herd positions himself between polis and poetics to call for 'a whole new language of welcome', a renewal that embraces inclusion, commits to openness of borders, a language (like the poem) that is rooted in the Declaration of Human Rights: 'welcoming', 'celebratory', 'courteous', 'real'. The syntax is organized by breath, fusing intention, intimacy and urgency. Walk Song is generous, tender, affirming work."-Nancy Gaffield "The vocabulary of David Herd's ongoing project is elemental, the line breaks test the ground as they go. The mode appears at first to be the personal lyric, where the self reaches out for relation. Yet, by such a return to first principles, by letting the sentence search both in its past and beyond history for the possibility of welcome, the poems open up a visionary space that feels utterly new and uncynical: where language is land is transcendent logic, where collective being and a poetry of humbled alliance might be drafted, where we might once again 'stand before [and against] the law / In the entirety of what [we know]'." -Vivek Narayanan The poems of Walk Song build through a series of sequences which look to animate solidarities and the languages of rights. These are poems of friendship and movement, landscape and politics, action and hope.