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" -
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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.)
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