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Tracey Herd's "heartbreaking lines" in the "harrowing" poems of her previous book, Not in This World, earned her high praise from the judges of the T.S. Eliot Prize. In Mute, traumatised voices are silenced or haunted in a stifling, claustrophobic world, unable to unfreeze. Yet in these poems, what is trapped in the head or buried in the heart can finally be heard and shared. Mute is a book which speaks especially to the unheard, and to those who dare not speak.
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
'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
‘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