In These Days of Prohibition

by Caroline Bird

Overview

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’.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781784104788
Publisher:	Carcanet Press, Limited
Publication date:	08/01/2017
Pages:	64
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Caroline Bird is an award-winning poet. Her first collection Looking Through Letterboxes was published in 2002 when she was 15. Her second collection, Trouble Came to the Turnip, was published in September 2006 to critical acclaim. Watering Can (2009) achieved a ‘Poetry Book Society Recommendation’ and her fourth collection, The Hat-Stand Union, (2013) was described by Simon Armitage as ‘spring-loaded, funny, sad and deadly.’ She won a major Eric Gregory Award in 2002 and was short-listed for the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2001.

Editorial Reviews

"Her poems burst with linguistic energy." —Times Literary Supplement



"An astonishingly assured piece of work." —Ruth Padel, Financial Times



"What an original captivating and spellbinding voice. Bird is fearless like 'the girl who dropped her ice-cream down a volcano and leaped in after it'. She's dangerous and witty too with a rare quality of imagination. This is a wonder, a beautifully written book of poems." —Lemn Sissay



"A carnival of characters spills out of these poems, chased by paparazzi, doing somersaults and cartwheels with language . . . Caroline Bird puts us on the inside looking deeper in, under the glittering skin to the place where laughter begins, where mothers are children, where people feel pain and speak in tongues, where tongues are knives and 'Someone still has to stay here and die'." —Imtiaz Dharker


"Caroline Bird has always written wise, bitterly funny and intellectually bracing poems. What has developed over the course of four collections is a voice heartbreaking in vision while simultaneously consoling in its constant and inspired invention." —Luke Kennard



"Bird is irrepressible; she simply explodes with poetry. The work erupts, spring-loaded, funny, sad, deadly - you don't know if a bullet will come out of the barrel or a flag with the word BANG on it." —Simon Armitage

From the Publisher