"The Air Year" by Caroline Bird (Carcanet, 2020)

Poems from Poetry, Poetry Review, TLS, etc.

The are some wild and wacky pieces. In "Nancy and the Torpedo" (3 pages) "Nancy found an entire torpedo in the forest ... 'He's a beauty alright. I reckon he weighs at least 600 pounds. 640, I'd say ... She'd already unzipped her trousers ... Her orgasm gathered to a scream ... Eventually she woke, refreshed and cheerful, patted the torpedo goodbye, hoisted on her backpack and we continued our journey as if nothing had happened ... 'We've passed this clearing before,' Nancy said. 'Different clearing,' I said. 'Those are our footprints from four days ago,' she said ... 'I love you. I just love you so much,' I said, as Nancy remounted ... That's when I lost it. ... 'Go ahead and dump me because I'm a piece of shit' ... There was a long pause ... 'I know exactly who you are,' she said, slapping the steel, 'you and him are headed in the same direction ... Can't you see I'm doing this for you? Can't you see I'm exploding for the both of us?'". I rather like it - the narrative holds the disparate elements together.

But I don't know how "Checkout" (14 lines) got into the book - "I think 'so, this is death' ... An angel approaches with a feedback form asking how I'd rate my life ... and I intend to tick 'average' ... then I recall your face ... tick 'very good' ... The angel asks if I enjoyed my stay and I say 'Oh yes, I'd definitely come again' and he gives me a soft look meaning 'that won't be possible but thanks all the same ..."

Over 50% of "Urban Myth" (which is laid out as prose) is an anecdote about the crew of a WW2 plane chewing gum fast to plug the bullet-holes. Then it's made into an analogy - "We played our love like that ... A patch-up job cobbled in mid-air from whatever we had in our pockets at the time, fighting fire with blobs of miscellaneous optimism ... cork each new wound with a wad of sweetness freshly printed from the panic of our mouths".

"I am not a Falconer" is another analogy. "I am standing in this field Holding my glove in the air ... Why did I let her go? ... I bet falcons are like Fedex The second you nip to the loo ... I lift my fist higher ... Like I'm asking God a question ... My glove is wrong And you are not a falcon"

Here's a stanza from "Loveborough" -

Everyone has a running machine facing a blue wall. The most beautiful girl in the world around here is called Samantha and she loves me. She sent a letter telling me so. I read it to my cactus and it flowered

To like the book you'll need to like a lot of chunks like that. Sometimes there's little connection between the bits - even if several are striking, they can read like pages from notebooks. "Rookie" is a ragbag. "Fancy dress" is a list poem (which has gusto all the same). "Sanity" is a more ordered sequence of lines. "The Red Telephone", "The Ground" and "Anaesthetic" are sequence poems where the situation ramps up, stage by stage. "The Tree Room" is prosey - it could be an extract from a journal.

"Drawn Onward" (the title's a palindrome) is a line-palindrome (first line equals last line, etc) - a good one. "Prepper" and "Primitive are 14-lines with an 8-6 split.

Other reviews

• Peter Raynard (In communicating the impossible, Bird mainly employs free verse and prose poems, which reflect the narrative nature of her subjects. ... But we shouldn’t be mistaken in thinking Bird’s poetry is pure comedic weirdness. Underlying many of the poems are vital issues to do with love and desire, the historic erasure of women, the postmodern madness of today’s world, and, what seems to me, the terror of living in end times.)
• Mary Anne Clark (Caroline Bird is an expert storyteller. Most of these poems have a dramatic immediacy, full of humour and the enjoyably bizarre ... The mini-narratives are not quite riddles and not quite parables, but they create a powerful sense of mysterious revelation.)
• Johm Wheway (Yes, it is fantastic fun, but the abundance of invention is often manic. Far from being a flaw, however, the manic energy of language in these poems, so contagious for this reader, perfectly enacts the narrator’s chaotic emotional world. ... Pile-ups of images throughout this book portray a fragmented reality so intense that it could be a relief to believe ‘We’re trapped inside a movie’.)
• goodreads
• Tayla Halfacre (Bird weaves fantasies and realities together, and by the end I began to find it hard to differentiate the two.)
• Jenny Gorrod (this collection is altogether ‘flatter’ emotionally than In These Days of Prohibition ... Bird’s style and approach really works in prose.)
• Pat Edwards (the poet plays with a set of images, one within another, in a riddle of impossibilities. Bird’s reference to stairs, mouths, doors, walls and secrets is reminiscent of the same strangeness. ... There are many filmic episodes and references, scenes played out like nasty but compulsive American box-sets. ... Caroline Bird is a poet like no other, always prepared to shower us in meteors of linguistic playfulness, in a frightening game of hide and seek. We don’t always need to understand every explosion of emotion to feel the power and passion. These poems are screenshots, epic movies, ground-breaking nuggets of prose, and something else we can’t even find words for. The Air Year is a fantastic, intimate, disturbing and beautiful tour de force.)

"In these days of prohibition" by Caroline Bird (Carcanet, 2017)

Poems from PN Review, Poetry Magazine, Poetry Review, The Rialto, etc. She said this in an interview - “I started this book 10 years ago even though I have had four books out in between. I ended up in a rehab facility in the Arizona desert. ... I ended up there for the reason most people do, which is that I was an addict and didn’t like myself enough." Oh no, I thought, not another addiction book. But this wasn't dashed out as therapy. It's a delayed selection, tracking a recovery. The first piece is sonnet-shaped, more info-dump than poem. "Patient intake questionnaire" is far better. I liked "Sentinel of anything" too. My favourite's the untypical "Eye contact". "The Moment" is the weakest.

I liked the earlier books of hers that I've read. I'm less sure about this one. When she strays into Melissa Lee-Houghton territory she looks a bit tame. When she writes Flash/mini-fiction (e.g. "Stephanie", "Beatification") she has tough competition. I'll home in on the poems on pages 39-44 as examples of the variation

• "Adultery for atheists" - a page long, left-aligned into a 5cm wide column. Gimmicky lay-out and not much of a poem
• "Ms Casanova on life support" - 2 pages of long-lined triplets. Again, the line/stanza-breaks are baffling, but this time the text is interesting, the patient feigning coma while bedside visitors sacrifice so much
• "Aesop's Hare in the celebrity big brother house" - Begins well, with "I did not snooze underneath that damn tree./ I blacked out". Triplets again - a page of them this time, with the first and last lines rhyming.
• "Self Storage" - A neat idea, and the execution begins well with "Here at Self Storage, we hold your secrets/ so you don't have to. Each steel locker is alarmed/ with a personalised code - perhaps an anniversary". 4 triplets then a couplet - I can see no pattern, but I guess it qualifies as a sonnet. Two poems later there's the contrasting "Public Resources" which begins with "There is a place called The Open/ where brave people put things"

She likes starting with a metaphor that extends into an analogy or even an allegory. I'm not sure all the extensions work - the resulting poem can feel sparse. "A toddler creates thunder by dancing on a manhole" seems to have developed from the observation mentioned in the title and has developed much as prose would. It's 2 pages long with only a few images, e.g. "Toddlers always dance like marionettes, their brains still learning the strings". In the final poem, "I want to marvel at the woman/ who ducks when she drives under bridges/ as if her body is the car ... as if she isn't in a car as all ... no car seat either, squatting on space like a lost figurine once glued to a ting bench on a train-set platform ... This blonde star in her car made of atoms, revving on a wish" which seems promising.

Other reviews

• Dave Coates (In ‘A Surreal Joke’, the speaker’s defence against the assumption that surrealism and comedy may be read and positioned as antithetical to ‘truth’ or ‘seriousness’ seems like an assertion that it is possible to write truthfully without granting the reader access to one’s private reality. ... there’s a majestic work of beauty like ‘Beatification’ ... Though the book’s three sections aren’t explicitly tied to any one theme, there are dominant notes in each; where the first seems mostly concerned with mental wellbeing, the second explores romantic intimacy, though guilt and the unreliability of the perceiving self are present in both ... Though a few poems, particularly in this last section, don’t have the same emotional fizz as the best in the book (several of which I haven’t discussed here; a good half dozen are straight on my dream-anthology longlist), when a poem’s dramatic argument is not quite up to Bird’s usual standard it is still buoyed by dynamic associative play, a serious glee in its weird logical leaps.)
• Annie Muir (My favourite poems in the collection are the ones where Bird uses her comic sensibility to get somewhere sincere. [e.g.] ‘Beatification’ ... Even in some of the joke-poems that seem throwaway there are moments of simple clarity)

"Watering Can" by Caroline Bird (Carcanet, 2009)

I don't remember her like this. Compared to her earlier Looking through Letterboxes these poems often sprawl, with lists replacing narrative, conceptual development and closure.

Here are 5 sample starts

The Doom I've been breaking clocks in case they use clocks in their bombs. I've been carrying a camouflaged tent and a brightly coloured tent. I put salt in my coffee to confuse them

Hit'n'miss fragments that mostly miss.

Blame the Poodle Like the girl who dropped her ice cream down a volcano and leaped in after it, too warm for comfort, I realised mid-air that my changes were gone, the second I entangled in the lead of a passing poodle

More promising, though the rest of the poem's disappointing.

Short Story If I was a person, like my granddad, who picked one partner and boiled them tea for the rest of my days, smiling supportively, I wouldn't have cheated. At least, I wouldn't have cheated with such a downright skank.

The first paragraph of a story?

I Married Green-Eyes I married Green-Eyes early last July. The neighbours all advised me to go green. Grass smells sweeter when the gooseberries cry. The butcher-boy went green when he got clean.

More towards the nonsense or surreal genre. There's end-rhyme, and elsewhere there are variants of villanelles.

Closet Affair When the shivers of shame have stopped, she said, I'll just hop on a bus and go back to my husband but first - this might sound odd - I want to sit in your airing cupboard for a couple of days

Could be a promising start.

There are 3-line poems and 3-page poems. Several poems take up 2 pages. I'd chop lines and sections from lots of them, but maybe other people will like the parts that I don't. To me they sound like caricature performance pieces, or attempts to be "modern". "Penelope's Chair" is interesting. It has 5 stanzas each with 4 long lines. Each final line contains the word "scruples". Here's stanza 2

I went to the adult bookshop for a book on adulthood but all they had was Threesome in Reno and Cream-gartered Sue. What's a novice monogamist to do? My love was at sea. Scruples splattered the sand like broken shells. My spyglass got bust.

The 1st line isn't funny (is it supposed to be?) and the last line doesn't do much. Here's the final stanza

A decade passed. I turned around. He was living with his mum. We hunched over a plate of chocolate biscuits, like old junkies. Our elbows went weak at the knees, a tear curled up in my ear Partied out, we grow scruples and watercress in the window.

I like line 2 but not "Our elbows ...", and the final line doesn't really cut it.

Other reviews

• Swansea Life
• Caroline Woodward (Osprey Journal)
• James McLaughlin (Stride)

"Looking Through Letterboxes" by Caroline Bird (Carcanet, 2002)

I like "No One in the Waiting Room Looks Up". "I have eaten your parrot" is funny enough. "Passing the Time" is less so - sub-Hannah. "The Enclosure Act" is almost pretentious. It's hard to see how "Middle of the Road" and "Advertisement for the Lonely Heads Column" got published. "Pissed Off Phone Box" (like several other poems) are a bit hit-and-miss, combining dodgy lines with inspired touches ("in the yellow pages of my favourite book").

All in all, quite a range. Many of the harder, non-teachable aspects of poetry are well-handled. Those that aren't should be easy enough to fix - similes too pat; "Seven Ways of Looking at a Fire" 3 ways too long, etc.

The blurb wisely omits mentioning that the author was 15 when the book came out.