Poetry Review: 'In These Days of Prohibition', Caroline Bird

Caroline Bird, born in 1986, is not a poet who shies away from the dark and difficult. Her eighth poetry collection, In These Days of Prohibition (2017), addresses mental illness, addiction, and anxiety, bringing these often-taboo topics to the bubbling surface of her poetry.

The collection strikes a paradoxical balance between irreverence (dark, parodic, wicked) and reverence (faux-spiritual, sympathetic, human), often leaving the reader stranded at the outbreak of a smile. Humour gives way to tragedy with the shock of a line, the twist of a knife.

The opening poem, ‘A Surreal Joke’, gives us a taste of the incoming tonal ambiguity. The speaker’s councillor calls her poems ‘surreal jokes’, leading to an argument: ‘I said, they’re not jokes. He said, maybe try / to write the simple truth? I said, why?’ The speaker refutes the clear-cut categories of ‘jokes’ or ‘simple truth[s]’. The collection instead opts for the poems caught in-between, simultaneously aiming to present the depressing truths (or close-to-truths) of the human psyche whilst finding dark humour through the suffering, like the sound of laughter echoing in the dark.

This humour becomes a coping mechanism, for readers as well as speakers, allowing her poems to often explore the darkest of territories. She leaves a breadcrumb trail of quips and ‘surreal jokes’, which we, of course, follow, until we find ourselves lost in the heart of the woods.

‘Star Vehicle’ is an excellent example: a poem which leads us in with a growing list of absurd questions from an assumed photographer, all beginning with ‘Can I shoot you…’. Yet, the increasing absurdity of the questions quickly shifts from the humorous (‘Can I shoot you with ketchup on your tights?’) to the invasively grotesque (‘Can I shoot you so close your eyeball jelly glistens?’), as the speaker’s desire to ‘shoot’ seems to shift between a camera and a gun. Originally written for a ‘Lit and Lynch’ project, it’s clear that ‘Star Vehicle’, as well as many of the poems in the collection, shares the violently surreal undertones of a Lynch film.

The collection has a deep sympathy for the inner lives of those suffering from mental illness and addiction, often bringing us into their minds, concerns, and visions in many of the poems. These visions are surreal, absurd, and ultimately heart-breaking. In ‘The Fear’, a speaker, eternally paranoid of her lover’s death in a car crash, confesses: ‘Last night, in bed, your arms / hurt like a jolted seatbelt.’ In the titular poem of the collection, an alcoholic confesses that, even without a speakeasy, ‘I’d still clink / in the basement of myself’. Adrift in their own thoughts, her speakers find no easy relief.

The third part of the collection, however, guides us back out of this darkness. Bird’s final poems are hopeful. They do not ignore the collection’s underlying sadness, but instead hope for escape. The initially amusing ‘A Toddler Creates Thunder By Dancing On A Manhole’ becomes a meditation on self-love and support, just as ‘The Blonde And The Atom Automobile’ marvels at finding independence in an interconnected cosmic world, ending with ‘The blonde star in her car / made of atoms, revving on a wish’. Hope blooms.

In all, I couldn’t recommend In These Days of Prohibition enough. Darkly comic, disturbing, yet sympathetic, the collection speaks the unspoken, bringing to light the deepest parts of the human psyche with an affecting compassion. I look forward to reading The Air Year (2020), her most recent collection.

Five Stand-Out Poems:

· ‘Stephanie’

· ‘Beatification’

· ‘The Fear’

· ‘A Toddler Creates Thunder By Dancing on a Manhole’

· ‘The Blonde and the Atom Automobile’