Mute

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

Tracey Herd was born in Scotland in 1968 and lives in Edinburgh. Her four collections with Bloodaxe are: No Hiding Place (1996), which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection; Dead Redhead (2001), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation; Not in This World (2015), a Poetry Book Society Choice shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize; and Mute (2025). 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.