Caroline Bird, In These Days of Prohibition (Carcanet, £9.99).
In These Days of Prohibition, Caroline Bird’s fifth collection with Carcanet, is full of poems that are almost always surreal, often funny, and sometimes profoundly shocking. The book has three sections, each with its own epigraph. It begins with a quote from John Ashbery: ‘Suppose this poem were about you – would you/ put in the things I’ve carefully left out?’ The first poem ‘A Surreal Joke’ begins:
Here the ‘curriculum vitae’ is used as a metaphor for the ‘autobiographical’ as used in poetry. The poem is a sonnet, in which the speaker goes on to joke about an ‘expensive’ failed suicide attempt, and to discuss a conversation with an ‘assigned counsellor’ who ‘told me I used/ poetry to hide from myself’ and called her poems ‘surreal jokes’:
to write the simple truth? I said, why?
‘Why’ would you try to tell ‘the simple truth’ when you could tell stories? Is there even such thing as ‘the simple truth’ to be told? This closing rhyming couplet introduces a book of poems that reflect the proportional make-up of most of the conversations I have in my daily life: ninety-nine per cent ‘jokes’ and one per cent ‘truth’.
The book is cram-packed with ‘surreal jokes’ that pay no attention to the speakers ‘curriculum vitae’ or personal life. Bird’s ‘Patient Intake Questionnaire’ features questions such as:
Do you think about your chin when you are kissing?
And the poem ‘Star Vehicle’ is another list of questions:
Can I shoot you raising twins, one mad and one sane?
My favourite poems in the collection are the ones where Bird uses her comic sensibility to get somewhere sincere. ‘Beatification’ is a prose poem in two sections in which the speakers 101 year old dad ‘discover[s] the pleasures of crystal meth’.
Whether or not you choose to believe the authenticity of this story, somehow it feels such a true and real portrayal of a daughter and aging father. It plays with the way our realities are so caught up in perception that they can be easily altered by things like drugs, emotions or our mental health.
Bird has a talent for finding the surreal in the real. The books features an ode to ‘Self Storage’, and ‘Megan Married Herself’ is a poem based on a recent news article – ‘Not a soul questioned their devotion.’ She always manages to keep the reader on their toes by manipulating ‘the simple truth’ to render it much more sinister and bizarre. In ‘Far From Civilisation’ a group of women seem to be on a strange sort of holiday:
Gemma said (Anna was the name of
her eating disorder).
And in ‘Family Christmas’, ‘Twitchy Tim finds a suicide note in his/Cracker:’
‘No one, you’ve all abandoned me.’
Even in some of the joke-poems that seem throwaway there are moments of simple clarity, like the poem about the sky falling down ‘First Signs’ – ‘after jogging, my trainers/ smelt of aeroplane food.’ My favourite poem in the collection, ‘The Moment’, caught me off guard simply by not being a joke (or maybe I just haven’t got it yet). The ‘Moment’ described by the speaker – the details of which have been ‘carefully left out’ – ‘has rotated in my mind’:
accidentally left in the pocket of a pair of jeans
in the washing machine
Poems that don’t give everything away force you to think about and remember them for longer than you would something that has been handed to you on a plate. After reading this poem you will be left in a strangely pleasurable limbo, unable to: ‘reassemble the actual occurrence, or/ think of anything else.’