No Hiding Place

Front Cover
Bloodaxe Books, 1996 - Poetry - 62 pages
No Hiding Place is the début collection from a highly original young Scottish poet whose influences range from detective stories and fairy-tales - with their battles between good and evil - to the films of Marilyn Monroe and Kay Kendall. Tracey Herd's title-poem takes the style of a 1950s film noir, with echoes of Raymond Chandler, pointing up the harsh sense pervading many of her poems that there is no hiding place from death, God and the Day of Judgement. Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection.

Contents

The Survivors
9
The Bathing Girls
10
11
11
The Snow Storm
12
Soap Queen
13
The Pink Rose Rings
14
Sir Ivor
15
In the Glassy Stream
16
Pat Taffe and Arkle
32
Marilyn Climbs Out of the Pool
33
On Location
34
Indian Summer
35
The Understudy
36
The Dungeon
37
The Nightmare of the Gallops Watcher
38
Playing the Clown
39

Words of Love
17
Girl Detective
18
The Siege
20
Stallion Graveyard Kentucky
21
Rosery
22
The Tapestry
23
Missing
24
Coronach
25
The Dinner Party
26
Paris in the Spring
27
The Gatecrashers
28
The Sun Slips Over
30
Brief Encounter
31
Big Girls
40
After the Impossible Dream
41
The FrontRunner
43
The Exhibits
44
The Bully
45
Sleepless
46
47
47
On the Glittering Beaches
48
Hyperions Bones
49
Artifice
50
No Hiding Place
51
Copyright

About the author (1996)

Tracey Herd was born in Scotland in 1968 and lives in Dundee. 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.

Bibliographic information