Glovebox: And Other Poems

These poems sparkle with life, with the life of the everyday, fleeting moments of work, play and imagining. All the little oddments of language that end up in the glovebox. This is language coursing through the city, sidewalks and cafes and theatres and pubs, through noisy crowds and intimate tete-a-tete’s and quiet soliloquies, language suffused with sensory detail and subtle inflection. This is the real thing.

• Bill Lavender

I was in a cab once and needed a map, so I went to open the glovebox, when the cabbie’s arm shot out and slammed it shut! Colin Herd’s ‘glovebox’ is kind of the opposite of that: reading these poems feels like unravelling an array of impossible silks from some unassuming compartment … the unexpected and deeply pleasing surfaces of these poems are both rough and smooth, awkward and tender, weightless and bright, and never blatant, never chintzy: although ‘the cloth will not obediently spread’, and is unpredictable and bunchy, it’s also ‘finer than a frog hair split four ways’, feels great on the eyes and hangs just right, in this winning and throwaway style that seemingly just came together without the help of a mirror - but these are throwaway lines you have to snap up and keep. There are designs here made of a special kind of attention and shading. Just looking at them makes me feel bashful and delighted. I do actually wish there was some way I could *wear* Colin Herd’s poems.

• Sam Riviere