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Shortlisted for the Polari Book Prize 2021 Winner of the 2020 Forward Prize for Best Collection Shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award 2020 A Telegraph Poetry Book of the Month (February 2020) A Telegraph Book of the Year 2020 A Guardian Book of the Year 2020 The Air Year is a time of flight, transition and suspension: signatures scribbled on the sky. Bird's speakers exist in a state of unrest, trapped in a liminal place between take-off and landing, undeniably lost. Love is uncontrollable, joy comes and goes at hurricane speed. They walk to the cliff edge, close their eyes and step out into the air. Caroline Bird has five previous collections published by Carcanet. Her fifth collection, In These Days of Prohibition, was shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize and the Ted Hughes Award.
Shortlisted for the 2017 Ted Hughes Award. Shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize. In These Days of Prohibition is Caroline Bird's fifth Carcanet collection. As always, she is a poet of dark hilarity and telling social comment. Shifting between poetic and vulgar registers, the surreal imagery of her early work is re-deployed to venture into the badlands of the human psyche. Her poems hold their subjects in an unflinching grip, addressing faces behind the veneer, asking what it is that keeps us alive. These days of prohibition are days of intoxication and inebriation, rehab in a desert and adultery for atheists, until finally Bird edges us out of danger, 'revving on a wish'.
Longlisted for the Polari Book Prize 2023 Caroline Bird is one of Carcanet's most popular poets. Her startling instinct for metaphor, the courage of her choice of subjects and the integrity of her witness, set her apart: a poem is a risk, and it has to be a risk worth taking for the poet and for the reader. Starting with Looking through Letterboxes in 2002 when she was fifteen years old, she has published six Carcanet books, culminating in The Air Year which was awarded the Forward Prize in 2020, shortlisted for the Polari Book Prize and the Costa Poetry Prize, and a Book of the Year in the Telegraph, Guardian and White Review. Rookie presents a formidable body of work composed over two decades from one of the poetry world's most energetic and consistently compelling voices.
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Bird at first appears to be a traditional story-teller. But her stories are suspended in a language charged with metaphor, and most of them are built upon foundations which are familiar: fairy tale, fantasy and the bitter-sweet world of romance.
Playful in earnest, Caroline Bird in her fourth book of poems turns familiar stories on their heads. Bird's protagonists declaim Chekhov in supermarkets, purchase mail-order tears, sing love-songs to hat-stands. Her characters and voices are at once savvy and vulnerable; underlying the exuberance is empathy with those who have lost themselves somewhere along the way. The everyday world of The Hat-Stand Union is beautiful, ominous and full of surprise.
A modern-day version of Euripides' anti-war play, The Trojan Women has been rewritten and is set in a mother-and-baby unit of a prison. The war is over. Beyond the prison walls, Troy and its people burn. Inside the prison, the city's captive women await their fate. Stalking the antiseptic confines of its mother and baby unit is Hecuba, the fallen Trojan queen, whilst the pregnant Chorus is shackled to her bed. But their grief at what has been before will soon be drowned out by the horror of what is to come, as the Greek lust for vengeance consumes everything – man, woman and baby – in its path. This caustic and radical new version of Euripides' classic tragedy comes from one of the UK's most exciting young poets, Caroline Bird. It is an intense, gripping look at what happens when the world collapses.
A collection of zesty, idiosyncratic and formally delightful poems, 'Trouble Came to the Turnip' explores fairy tale, fantasy and the bittersweet world of romance with humour and originality.
Forever on the right side of history, but on the wrong side of life, Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson is caught between revolutionary and parliamentary politics as she fights for a better world. Battling to save Jewish refugees in Nazi Germany; campaigning for Britain to aid the fight against Franco's Fascists in Spain; leading two hundred workers in the Jarrow Crusade against unemployment and poverty... she pursues each cause with a passionate, reckless conviction. And yet - despite a life spent running into the likes of Albert Einstein and Ernest Hemingway, serving in Churchill's cabinet, having affairs with communist spies and government ministers - she still finds herself, somehow, on the outside looking in. Caroline Bird's play Red Ellen is the remarkable true story of an inspiring and brilliant woman. It was first produced by Northern Stage, Nottingham Playhouse and the Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh in 2022.
"Women over the age of fifty-five who live alone are the fastest-growing population group in the United States. And for a woman in her mid-fifties, who probably has more than a quarter of a century of living before her, the news is both surprising and encouraging." "In this groundbreaking book, Caroline Bird reports on the hitherto undocumented world of lively, productive, independent women who are inventing satisfying new lives for themselves, mostly after spending years in the traditional roles of wives and mothers." "In searching for these pioneers, Bird found an immensely varied group of women who are living full lives well into their seventies, eighties, even nineties. What they have in...