]The Air Year is Caroline Bird‰’s sixth collection with Carcanet. Her most recent and highly successful, In These Days of Prohibition, was shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize and the Ted Hughes Award. Bird, who published her first collection at the age of 15, displays an astonishing talent and a unique’voice‰’, and is known for her engaging and witty performance.

The opening poem,’Mid-Air‰’, has an atmosphere of lightness, eroticism and optimism, but this buoyancy is quickly dispelled in the poems that follow. Bird uses thrillingly surreal narratives, as in’Nancy and the Torpedo‰’, where strong sexual imagery meets a Babes-in-the-Woods fairy-tale atmosphere. This is Bird at her most idiosyncratic style; juxtaposing surreal encounters with interior emotions that speak to the reader in new and startling ways….

This is an excerpt of a review by Jenny Gorrod of Caroline Bird’s Forward Prize winning, The Air Year. For more information on Bird at StAnza21, please click HERE. To read the whole review, go to the DURA webpage.