Description
Book SynopsisTracey Herd’s long awaited new collection was inspired by the late actress Elizabeth Hartman’s lifelong struggle with mental illness and by her own experience of living with clinical depression. The book examines the eternal bonds of love and friendship and the joys, grief and losses which imbue the human experience. These deeply personal yet vibrant poems also use the mediums of film, music and memory to create a collection which reverberates with pain and yet still finds small moments of happiness to savour. Not in This World, Tracey Herd’s third collection from Bloodaxe, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and was a Poetry Book Society Choice. Her debut, No Hiding Place (1996) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and her second collection, Dead Redhead (2001), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
Trade ReviewThe poems in Tracey Herd's Not in this World are harrowing, as if sculpted with an ice-pick in the glaciers of depression. Yet the ice is fiery, survival is at stake in an unsentimental world, where the diction is as rigorous as the gaze. There are Hollywood starlets, Ruffian the racehorse, and self-portraits where Herd confronts her own demons. Heart-breaking lines… conjure a world pared to the bone. It is rare to come across lines as stripped and taut as hers. -- Pascale Petit * chair of the 2015 T.S. Eliot Prize judges *
What’s interesting about Herd’s poems is her use of everyday speech in settings that are themselves highly wrought… she offers a wintry bareness that offsets the bookish and filmic cast of her imagination, often with a sense of finality… -- Sean O'Brien * Guardian *
Tracey Herd's Not in this World would be a worthy winner of the TS Eliot Prize, for which it is shortlisted. "Happy Birthday" must contain this year's saddest lines. The carefully modulated rage, grief and self-recriminations for an aborted foetus bears comparison with Sylvia Plath at her most coolly savage… But there is more to Herd than closely observed misery. She writes with sensitivity about classic movie stars… It is remarkable how much comedy, however black, Herd finds in the gloom. -- James Kidd * The Independent *
