No Hiding Place

Tracey Herd has been influenced by detective stories and fairy tales (with their battles between good and evil), and movies with Marilyn Monroe and Kay Kendall. Her title poem takes the style of a 1950s film noir, with echoes of Raymond Chandler, illustrating the thought pervading many of Herd's poems that there is no hiding place from death, God, and Judgement Day. As one critic abroad has stated, Herd's strange personal iconography becomes steadily more charged and disturbing as her obsessive, darkly sexual poems accumulate. Terrible chasms seem to lurk beneath even the most innocently domestic of her subjects. These poems clearly compelled themselves to be written.