{"id":8686,"date":"2017-10-23T22:06:24","date_gmt":"2017-10-23T21:06:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=8686"},"modified":"2017-10-26T11:47:24","modified_gmt":"2017-10-26T10:47:24","slug":"caroline-bird-in-these-days-of-prohibition-carcanet-2017-reviewed-by-annie-muir","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=8686","title":{"rendered":"Caroline Bird,\u00a0In These Days of Prohibition<\/em>, reviewed by Annie Muir"},"content":{"rendered":"
Caroline Bird, In These Days of Prohibition<\/em> (Carcanet, \u00a39.99).<\/h5>\n

In These Days of Prohibition<\/em>, Caroline Bird\u2019s 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: \u2018Suppose this poem were about you \u2013 would you\/ put in the things I\u2019ve carefully left out?\u2019 The first poem \u2018A Surreal Joke\u2019 begins:<\/p>\n

One year is blank on my curriculum vitae.<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

Here the \u2018curriculum vitae\u2019 is used as a metaphor for the \u2018autobiographical\u2019 as used in poetry. The poem is a sonnet, in which the speaker goes on to joke about an \u2018expensive\u2019 failed suicide attempt, and to discuss a conversation with an \u2018assigned counsellor\u2019 who \u2018told me I used\/ poetry to hide from myself\u2019 and called her poems \u2018surreal jokes\u2019:<\/p>\n

I said, they\u2019re not jokes. He said, maybe try
\nto write the simple truth? I said, why?<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

\u2018Why\u2019 would you try to tell \u2018the simple truth\u2019 when you could tell stories? Is there even such thing as \u2018the simple truth\u2019 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 \u2018jokes\u2019 and one per cent \u2018truth\u2019.<\/p>\n

The book is cram-packed with \u2018surreal jokes\u2019 that pay no attention to the speakers \u2018curriculum vitae\u2019 or personal life. Bird\u2019s \u2018Patient Intake Questionnaire\u2019 features questions such as:<\/p>\n

Have you started to look at pigeons like they know something?
\nDo you think about your chin when you are kissing?<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

And the poem \u2018Star Vehicle\u2019 is another list of questions:<\/p>\n

Can I shoot you witnessing the entire life of a pot plant?
\nCan I shoot you raising twins, one mad and one sane?<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

My favourite poems in the collection are the ones where Bird uses her comic sensibility to get somewhere sincere. \u2018Beatification\u2019 is a prose poem in two sections in which the speakers 101 year old dad \u2018discover[s] the pleasures of crystal meth\u2019.<\/p>\n

The last time I visited him he was slow-dancing to trance music in the hallway with a young bodybuilder. They were both naked. […] I watched for a minute then let myself out. He wasn\u2019t coming down again. Not for anyone. He was with the angels now.<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Bird has a talent for finding the surreal in the real. The books features an ode to \u2018Self Storage\u2019, and \u2018Megan Married Herself\u2019 is a poem based on a recent news article – \u2018Not a soul questioned their devotion.\u2019 She always manages to keep the reader on their toes by manipulating \u2018the simple truth\u2019 to render it much more sinister and bizarre. In \u2018Far From Civilisation\u2019 a group of women seem to be on a strange sort of holiday:<\/p>\n

\u2018I left Anna in the airport toilets,\u2019
\nGemma said (Anna was the name of
\nher eating disorder).<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

And in \u2018Family Christmas\u2019, \u2018Twitchy Tim finds a suicide note in his\/Cracker:\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018Knock Knock.\u2019 \u2018Who\u2019s there?\u2019
\n\u2018No one, you\u2019ve all abandoned me.\u2019<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

Even in some of the joke-poems that seem throwaway there are moments of simple clarity, like the poem about the sky falling down \u2018First Signs\u2019 \u2013 \u2018after jogging, my trainers\/ smelt of aeroplane food.\u2019 My favourite poem in the collection, \u2018The Moment\u2019, caught me off guard simply by not being a joke (or maybe I just haven\u2019t got it yet). The \u2018Moment\u2019 described by the speaker – the details of which have been \u2018carefully left out\u2019 \u2013 \u2018has rotated in my mind\u2019:<\/p>\n

like a paper napkin
\naccidentally left in the pocket of a pair of jeans
\nin the washing machine<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

Poems that don\u2019t 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: \u2018reassemble the actual occurrence, or\/ think of anything else.\u2019<\/p>\n

Annie Muir<\/h5>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Caroline Bird, In These Days of Prohibition (Carcanet, \u00a39.99). In These Days of Prohibition, Caroline Bird\u2019s 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: \u2018Suppose this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nCaroline Bird,\u00a0In These Days of Prohibition, reviewed by Annie Muir - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=8686\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Caroline Bird,\u00a0In These Days of Prohibition, reviewed by Annie Muir - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Caroline Bird, In These Days of Prohibition (Carcanet, \u00a39.99). 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