Mute

Mute is Tracey Herd’s fourth collection from Bloodaxe, following Not in This World (2015), a Poetry Book Society Choice which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. 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.

'The 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 on Not in This World

‘…Tracey Herd’s Not in This World explores mental health and the relationship between joy and grief in a melancholy and precise collection drawing on the actress Elizabeth Hartman’s life and Herd’s own experiences of depression.’ – Charlotte Runcie, Daily Telegraph

‘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