Not in This World

Shortlisted for the 2015 T.S. Eliot Prize

Poetry Book Society Choice

Tracey 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 is Tracey Herd’s third collection from Bloodaxe. 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

‘There’s a real obsession with story in this highly appealing and enjoyable collection, recently shortlisted for the prestigious TS Eliot prize. Herd ruminates over films and the stories they tell, as well as the ones they don’t, the lives of the actors themselves. Mirrors, glass houses, the moon all feature in her romantic but disciplined approach.’ – Lesley McDowell, Sunday Herald (Four Good Reads)

‘It is a collection that explores the place of women in life, on screen, in fiction and Herd’s balance of the distant and the intimate make reading and re-reading her poems a joy.’ – Charlie Gracie, Northwords Now, on Not in this World

‘Not in This World is further proof of Herd’s enormous talent, her ability to draw her readers into the hinterland of her fascinations and surprise, challenge and delight us with the blistering force of her perceptions. Dark they may be, but these are poems that are a joy to savour, beguiling enough to bear repeated readings, each one throwing up fresh ideas thanks to Herd’s keen wit and kaleidoscopic knowledge of popular culture.’ – Jacqueline Thompson, Glasgow Review of Books

‘The poems in the book tend to inhabit quite a dark landscape and explore the multifaceted experiences of love and friendship, pain and joy, grief and loss.’ – The Scotsman, Poem of the Week, on Not in This World

Tracey Herd was born in Scotland in 1968 and lives in Edinburgh. She studied at Dundee University, where she was Creative Writing Fellow in 1998-2001. In 1993 she won an Eric Gregory Award, and in 1995 a Scottish Arts Council Bursary.

In 1997 she took part in Bloodaxe’s New Blood tour of Britain, and in 1998 was the youngest poet in the British-Russian Poetry Festival organised by the British Council with Bloodaxe when she gave readings in Moscow and Ekaterinburg and her poems appeared on metro trains in Russian cities.

In 2000 she read her poems over the public address system in the winners enclosure at Musselburgh racecourse. In 2002 she collaborated on a short opera, Descent, with the composer Gordon McPherson for Paragon Ensemble which was performed at the Traverse Theatre in Glasgow. In 2004 she received a Creative Scotland Bursary.

She was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Dundee University in 2009-11. She is now working as a Royal Literary Fund Lector and participating in their Bridge Project.

She has published three collections with Bloodaxe: No Hiding Place (1996), which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection; Dead Redhead (2001), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation; and Not in This World (2015), a Poetry Book Society Choice shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.