Not in This World

by Tracey Herd

Overview

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.

'This vivid and haunting collection…An extraordinary vision of how most of us live in that gap between fantasy and the real, always seeking, and failing, to control our paths…here is a poet working at the height of her powers, with a delicacy of touch, careful irony, and a deep understanding of how fantasy works that set her apart as a chronicler of pop culture, illusion and the persistence of the real.'—John Burnside & Tim Liardet, PBS Bulletin, on Not in This World

‘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

‘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)

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781852248949
Publisher:	Bloodaxe Books
Publication date:	11/12/2015
Pages:	64
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

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 Universityin 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.

Table of Contents

What I Wanted 11

What I Remember 12

The Little Sister 13

Not James Dean 14

The Fortune Teller 15

The Living Library 16

The Case of the Inconvenient Corpse 17

Nobody Home 19

Sheep 21

Vivien and Scarlett 22

Norma Shearer 23

Sea Birds 24

Glass House 25

Hall of Mirrors 26

Eyes Wide Shut 27

The Diner 28

You Can't Take My World from Me 30

When a Lovely Flame Dies 31

At the Captain's Table 32

Vessel 34

The Imaginary Death of Star 35

Archive 37

Joan Fontaine and Rebecca 38

Olivia de Havilland 40

Brigadoon 42

Louise Brooks 43

Dreams of Lost Summers and Found Lines 44

Leaving 47

Reverie 48

No Reason 50

Cemetery in Snow 52

Happy Birthday 53

Solo 55

The Afternoon Shift Are Leaving the Port Talbot Steelworks 57

Momentum 58

Ruffian 59

Spring in the Valley of the Racehorse 61

Near Clearlake, Idaho 63

Five Seconds 64

The Music Men 66

Not Fade Away 68

The Unicorn Seat 70

Just One Request 71

Calling Card 72

Acknowledgments 77

Editorial Reviews

'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

‘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

From the Publisher