{"id":562,"date":"2020-05-17T16:25:20","date_gmt":"2020-05-17T16:25:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.johnwheway.com\/?p=562"},"modified":"2020-05-17T16:28:10","modified_gmt":"2020-05-17T16:28:10","slug":"review-of-the-air-year-by-caroline-bird","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.johnwheway.com\/?p=562","title":{"rendered":"Review of ‘The Air Year’ by Caroline Bird"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"My Review of ‘The Air Year’ the new poetry collection (Carcanet)<\/a> by Caroline Bird <\/a>reproduced here, was also published in ‘The High Window’<\/a> in May 2020.<\/p>\n

In her exhilarating how-to essay, \u2018The Discipline of Getting Lost: On the Impossibility of Poems\u2019 (in \u2018Craft\u2019, ed. R,Dastidar, Nine Arches Press,<\/a> 2019), Caroline Bird advises poets to \u2018Fling open the door of your first line\u2019. \u2018Write a first line,\u2019 she instructs, \u2018that thrusts you out, unprepared, into a world of your own making\u2019. Her latest collection of poems, \u2018The Air Year\u2019 offers textbook examples of such first lines: <\/p>\n

\u2018Nancy found an entire torpedo in the forest\u2019 (Nancy and the Torpedo)
\n\u2018I think \u2018so, this is death\u2019 and wonder why\u2019 (Checkout)
\n\u2018It\u2019s like being a windmill in a vacuum\u2019 (The Deadness)
\n\u2018The hotel was called Napthalene Heights\u2019(Napthalene Heights)
\n\u2018I do kind gestures. Remove my appendix.\u2019 (Sanity)
\n\u2018No-one dies here or chews their food properly\u2019 (Loveborough)<\/p>\n

What is an \u2018Air Year\u2019? Is it airy, airy-fairy, airless, full of hot air, airborne? Is it a breath of fresh air, up in the air, a pocket, a bubble of air? A time of coming up for air? The collection is all of these and more. As a reader, I was impelled to obsessive free association, to frequent raids on my dictionary, the poet\u2019s baroque cascades of gorgeous, inventive, often preposterous imagery inviting me to join in the fun.
\n<\/p>\n

Yes, it is fantastic fun, but the abundance of invention is often manic. Far from being a flaw, however, the manic energy of language in these poems, so contagious for this reader, perfectly enacts the narrator\u2019s chaotic emotional world. <\/p>\n

The focus is on love: lacking it, longing for it, getting lost in it, losing it. Driven by ambivalence about her desires, the narrator is portrayed as an addict, sometimes drowning in the addiction, eventually in rehab, with intervals of recovery before some fresh relapse. <\/p>\n

\u2018Mid-air\u2019 the opening poem, finds her and her lover suspended \u2018in amber\u2019, \u2018Our mouths
\nmidway\/across the same\/inhalation like robbers mid-leap between\/rooftops\u2019. Almost every line break orchestrates this suspended state \u2013 air, in the poem, is a held breath. It\u2019s a moment of suspense, of anticipation, yet also a moment of arrest, of stasis, \u2018A note almost sung\u2019 that fails to arrive at song, a moment of agonising hesitancy filled with longing, comically yet wistfully depicted: \u2018Locked\/in the amber of the and.\/We just want to land or\/be landed on\u2019.<\/p>\n

In \u2018Dive Bar\u2019, we plunge into a kind of hell \u2018down a steep flight\/of stairs into a windowless cellar\u2019 where \u2018an ing\u00e9nue in a smoking jacket\/sits atop a piano\/as a host of swaying women\/sing \u201cYour Secret\u2019s Safe with Me\u201d\u2019, through a series of increasingly vertiginous descents: \u2018down a steep flight\/of throat into a windowless cell\u2019, then \u2018through a red breath down a dark\/thought into a swallowed sense\/with shrinking walls\u2026as a host of silent passions\/mouth \u201cYour Secret is Yourself\u201d\/inside the belly of the world\u2019. Here \u2018dark clandestine places\u2019 become \u2018dark dissolving spaces\u2019 in both the world and in the self, from which the \u2018windowless woman\u2019 manages to escape, perhaps in imagination only, by breaking\/walls down in herself, sprinting\/up the shrinking\/halls and up contracting\/corridors and up the choking\/fits of hard stares through dark\/thoughts and dead\/laws\u2019 till \u2018you\u2019re spat out\/on the pavement with\/the sun just\/coming out\u2019. A nightmarish coming out indeed.<\/p>\n

In a later poem, \u2018The Ground\u2019, the motif of descent appears again as falling off a cliff and landing on what appears to be the safe ground of domestic normality, where \u2018I can bake that lasagne now\u2019, only to find the ground giving way before landing again where it might be possible to \u2018buy a puppy\u2019, or further down, perhaps to\u2018 put up a shelf. Make that baby\u2019. When the \u2018falling, landing, falling out\u2019 stops, \u2018You lie and let your bones heal\u2026experiencing plateau\u2026cold, hard, real, the opposite\/of air. You shake like a prodigal astronaut.\/I could build a house on this, you think,\/staggering off.\u2019 Though conveying a nightmare instability and lack of security, this poem like many here, also manages a comic, even slapstick absurdity, laughing at its own horror, not callously, but with compassion. <\/p>\n

Many of the poems are beautifully linked. \u2018Urban Myth\u2019 the prose poem which follows \u2018The Ground\u2019
\nis a good example, in which the theme of falling re-appears, this time in an anecdote of the WWII fighter plane which,\u2018riddled with bullets from enemy fire\u2019, is kept in the air by the crew\u2019s chewing \u2018Wrigley\u2019s peppermint gum\u2026to bung the bullet holes\u2019. The anecdote is \u2018not a true story\u2019 but provides a telling simile: \u2018We played our love like that for a while\u2026a patch-up job cobbled in mid-air\u2026fighting fire with blobs of miscellaneous optimism\u2026cork(ing) each new wound with a wad of swe\u00e8tness freshly printed from the panic of our mouths.\u2019 Here, one again, Bird the dramatic poet fuses comedy and tragedy in a poignant portrayal of fragile relationship.<\/p>\n

Pile-ups of images throughout this book portray a fragmented reality so intense that it could be a relief to believe \u2018We\u2019re trapped inside a movie\u2019. (Surrealism for Beginners). Yet with considerable pathos, its narrator insists that she and her much-craved lover are no poor players.<\/p>\n

Bird\u2019s extraordinary fecundity of language, on vivid display throughout the collection, is itself viewed reflexively in several poems. In \u2018Speechless\u2019 (which is also about what needs to be said but has been unsaid), \u2018the words\u2026wrapped in furs like Russian soldiers\/vowels crammed like backpacks\u2026syllables bent from all the shouldering\u2019 leave the house \u2018in their thinnest summer\/jackets, despite the December cold\u2026now they\u2019re shameless on the air, naked as a tune\/sung by a sated ghost\u2019. In \u2018Anaesthetic\u2019 words give the narrator a fix to manage her love-craving. While with certain words are predictably soothing \u2013 \u2018I love you.\/Boom! I\u2019ll feel better for a whole entire day\u2019, others, like \u2018Lozenge.\/Any word.\/Lysol. Shellac. Ditto.\u2019 also relieve the pain. If this suggests the writing of poems might sometimes begin as a therapy, we have to be grateful it leads to poems as satisfying and accomplished as \u2018The Air Year\u2019. This book has genuinely expanded my sense of what can be done in poetry. Please do fling open its door.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My Review of ‘The Air Year’ the new poetry collection (Carcanet) by Caroline Bird reproduced here, was also published in ‘The High Window’ in May 2020. In her exhilarating how-to essay, \u2018The Discipline of Getting Lost: On the Impossibility of Poems\u2019 (in \u2018Craft\u2019, ed. R,Dastidar, Nine Arches Press, 2019), Caroline Bird advises poets to \u2018Fling […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"My Review of 'The Air Year' by Caroline Bird @CarolineBirdUK also published in @highwindowpress in May 2020","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[18,15,17,16],"class_list":["post-562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-views-and-reviews","tag-carcanet","tag-caroline-bird","tag-nine-arches-press","tag-the-high-window-press"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7DaEn-94","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":557,"url":"https:\/\/www.johnwheway.com\/?p=557","url_meta":{"origin":562,"position":0},"title":"‘Re-visioning Exile’, Review of ‘Afterwardness’ by Mimi Khalvati","author":"afterthebeginning","date":"May 15, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"My review of 'Afterwardness' by Mimi Khalvati reproduced here, was published in The High Window in January, 2020. Mimi Khalvati\u2019s new book is a sustained series of meditations on the theme of exile. For its eloquent deployment of form and the depth of its emotional excavation, I consider it poetry\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Views and Reviews"","block_context":{"text":"Views and Reviews","link":"https:\/\/www.johnwheway.com\/?cat=5"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.johnwheway.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/mimi.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":585,"url":"https:\/\/www.johnwheway.com\/?p=585","url_meta":{"origin":562,"position":1},"title":"Celebrating ‘A Bluebottle in Late October’","author":"afterthebeginning","date":"May 18, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"I'm very happy that my new full collection A Bluebottle in Late October is now out with V.Press Because of the lockdown, I can't have a face-to-face launch but here are 5 videos of me reading sample poems. Take a look. Video Day 1. I'm reading 'A Minor Crisis', the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Publications"","block_context":{"text":"Publications","link":"https:\/\/www.johnwheway.com\/?cat=4"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.johnwheway.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/IMG_1962-802x1024.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.johnwheway.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/IMG_1962-802x1024.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.johnwheway.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/IMG_1962-802x1024.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x"},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johnwheway.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/562","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johnwheway.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johnwheway.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johnwheway.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johnwheway.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=562"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.johnwheway.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/562\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":584,"href":"https:\/\/www.johnwheway.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/562\/revisions\/584"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johnwheway.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johnwheway.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johnwheway.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}