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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.
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.
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'.
Caroline Bird's new poems show us the ambush of real life that occurs in the stillness after the happy ending. This is a collection about marriage, lesbian parenthood, addiction and recovery in which a recurring dream is playing out: a world where mums impale themselves on pogo-sticks, serial killers rattle around in basements, baby monitors are haunted by someone else's baby and, through it all, love stays and stays like a stationary rollercoaster that turns out to be the scariest, most thrilling ride in the amusement park. Her editor welcomed the book in these terms: 'It is bleak, repellent and hilarious in an American Psycho-ish way. Hectic and vivid.' 'Vegetable crisps. The words yawn like a black hole, sucking my eyes backwards into my head until I see my own brain glowing like a radioactive cauliflower.'
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.
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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.
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 Poetry Book Society Spring 2021 Special Commendation. Edited by Michael Schmidt and John McAuliffe, this is the latest in Carcanet's celebrated introductory anthology series presenting work by two dozen poets writing in English from around the world. Jason Allen-Paisant, Chad Campbell, Conor Cleary, Hal Coase, Jade Cuttle, Jennifer Edgecombe, Charlotte Eichler, Suzannah V. Evans, Parwana Fayyaz, Maryam Hessavi, Holly Hopkins, Rebecca Hurst, Victoria Kennefick, Jenny King, Joseph Minden, Benjamin Nehammer, Stav Poleg, Nell Prince, Padraig Regan, Tristram Fane Saunders, Colm Tóibín, Joe Carrick-Varty, Christine Roseeta Walker, and Isobel Williams.