In These Days of Prohibition
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Carcanet Press Ltd
Published:27th Jul '17
Should be back in stock very soon
*A great performer on page and stage, Caroline - poet and dramatist - in her fifth collection pretends to set her satiric weaponry aside to seek 'simple truth'*In the badlands of the human psyche, she finds more than we bargained for. As always she is a poet of uncontrolled hilarity and telling social comment*Caroline was twice shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and won an Eric Gregory Award*Her first Carcanet collection was published in 2002 when she was 14 years old. She lives in London
A great performer on page and stage, Caroline Bird in her fifth collection pretends to lay down her celebrated satiric weaponry to seek out ‘simple truth’. Venturing into the badlands of the human psyche, she finds more than we bargained for.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’.
'The poems of In These Days of Prohibition are disquieting: institutionalised, hedonistic, vacuous and nihilistic. The collection takes a hard look at contemporary society but is, ultimately, uplifting. If Brett Easton Ellis wrote poems, I'd like to think they'd be poems like these.'
John Field in the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize shortlist newsletter
'The poems in this, Bird's fifth collection, explode on the page, bristling with a vision of sanity within madness, order within chaos. She has the ability to describe a tortured soul in a twenty-first century manner, bringing humour, contemporary idiom and irony into the work.'
Dundee University Review of the Arts
'Since she published her debut aged 15 in 2002, Bird's witty writing has been wrongly dismissed in some quarters as lightweight. This brave eighth collection (a slant account of her year in rehab) proves those critics wrong from its first page.'
Tristram Fane Saunders, The Daily Telegraph
'Achieves serious funniness by filtering mental illness and addiction through the prism of pop-surrealism.'
Jeremy Noel-Tod, The Sunday Times
'Caroline Bird's In These Days of Prohibition is equally pleasurable and disturbing, because it understands the genuinely strange ground on which we must build our thoughts and our emotions. In work of great and frequently comic poise it captures moments of absolute loss of control, and absolute freedom. We recognise that sustained unsettling comic virtuosity is the startling agent by which we engage with such loss, such freedom.'
W.N Herbert (Chair of the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize Judging Panel)
'Bird is a master of bleak humour interlaced with wry social commentary.'
Poetry London
'Caroline Bird's is an unquestionably vigorous and original voice'
Suzannah V. Evans,The TLS
'If for Wallace Stevens poetry was the 'Supreme Fiction', Robert Lowell argued 'why not say what happened?' Bird, however, grabs Confessionalism by the throat to produce a surreal if formally controlled autobiography.'
Julian Stannard, The Poetry Review
- Short-listed for T.S. Eliot Prize 2017
- Short-listed for Ted Hughes Award for New Poetry 2017
ISBN: 9781784104788
Dimensions: 216mm x 135mm x 7mm
Weight: unknown
64 pages