There has been a long interval between Tracey Herd’s second collection, Dead Redhead (2001), and the Scottish poet’s welcome return with Not in This World, which has been shortlisted for next week’s TS Eliot prize. While there are clear lines of continuity with her previous work, the mythopoeic element in her imagination has come decisively to the fore. In the arresting opening poem, “What I Wanted”, a snowy night finds the narrator “watching / a dark figure disappear; / then I would slip out fearlessly, / sure-footed and fleet, / with my magnifying glass / and pocket torch to follow / the tracks that led off as far / as a child’s eye could see, / and then a little further”. Fairytale, the Secret Seven and Nancy Drew converge in what we may infer are the final moments of innocence.
A child’s wish to be inside the story – to lead the life of the imagination – is no defence against what might be waiting there. What Peter Porter called “fictions to be real in” may hold dangers of their own, particularly when, as in myth, past, present and future can be simultaneously to hand in a single scenario. In “Glass House”, for example, the speaker already knows her fate – to be standing in a hall of mirrors, sexually betrayed, a pawn – before it has happened, because it is permanently taking place.
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