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    In These Days of Prohibition
    In These Days of Prohibition
    In These Days of Prohibition
    Ebook61 pages31 minutes

    In These Days of Prohibition

    By Caroline Bird

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    About this ebook

    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'.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCarcanet Press Ltd.
    Release dateDec 19, 2017
    ISBN9781784104795
    In These Days of Prohibition
    Author

    Caroline Bird

    Caroline Bird is a poet and playwright. Her 2020 collection, The Air Year, won the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2020 and was shortlisted for the Polari Prize and the Costa Prize. Her fifth collection, In These Days of Prohibition, was shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize and the Ted Hughes Award. A two-time winner of the Foyle Young Poets Award, her first collection, Looking Through Letterboxes, was published in 2002 when she was fifteen. She won an Eric Gregory Award in 2002 and was shortlisted for the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2001 and the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2008 and 2010. As a playwright, Bird has been shortlisted for the George Devine Award and the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. Her theatre credits include: The Trojan Women (Gate Theatre, 2012), The Trial of Dennis the Menace (Purcell Room, 2012), Chamber Piece (Lyric Hammersmith, 2013), The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Northern Stage, 2015), The Iphigenia Quartet (Gate Theatre, 2016) and Red Ellen (Northern Stage, Nottingham Playhouse, Royal Lyceum Theatre and York Theatre Royal, 2022). She was one of the five official poets at the 2012 London Olympics.

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      Book preview

      In These Days of Prohibition - Caroline Bird

      Copyright

      I

      Suppose this poem were about you – would you put in the things I’ve carefully left out?

      John Ashbery

      A SURREAL JOKE

      One year is blank on my curriculum vitae.

      I was in the desert, convalescing,

      repairing my septum. I’d tried to die

      expensively, dragging it out over

      six months, locked in my university

      bathroom with a rolled-up scrap of canto.

      I forgot how to love my family.

      At one point, my arms turned completely blue.

      My assigned counsellor told me I used

      poetry to hide from myself, unhook

      the ballast from my life; a floating ruse

      of surreal jokes. He stole my notebook.

      I said, they’re not jokes. He said, maybe try

      to write the simple truth? I said, why?

      PATIENT INTAKE QUESTIONNAIRE

      Do you taste pepper whilst eating ice cream?

      Do sandwiches appear intricately designed?

      Do you think of waterfalls when lighting a match?

      Have you started to look at pigeons like they know something?

      Do you think about your chin when you are kissing?

      Can you feel the blood in your thumb?

      Do your eyebrows feel like stickers?

      Do you look twice at your name on a letter?

      Does your hair hurt?

      When barefoot, do your shoes feel too tight?

      Can you sense the tiny holes in the cotton of your shirt?

      Do you peel bananas fearfully in case there is no banana inside?

      Does the ceiling occasionally ripple?

      Has your pillow developed a strange echo?

      Does your neck feel like a bone?

      Do you hear sex noises through the wall when standing in a field?

      BIPOLAR PURGATORY

      Hey! I’ve got a theme song in my tooth,

      Tabasco spleen, a reason to say ‘halcyon’,

      a cobbler on speed-dial who specialises in

      stretchy glass slippers, an honorary degree

      from the Hot Pink Sensorium, two tickets

      for literally every aeroplane, all laid atop

      the chiffon in my valise but right now I’m

      thinking about moonstruck linen, beaded

      skin, a lover swallowed by my sighing or

      maybe I’m planning a heist, it’s hard to tell

      with my hood up and sunglasses, shivering

      in sweatpants etc but I

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