In These Days of Prohibition

The poems in Caroline Bird’s In These Days of Prohibition are profoundly disquieting, exploring obsession, hedonism and anxiety, writes John Field

The collection, its epigraph taken from John Ashbery’s ‘The Problem of Anxiety’, plays with absence from the outset: ‘Suppose this poem were about you – would you / put in the things I’ve carefully left out?’ Caroline Bird’s ‘A Surreal Joke’ opens with the end-stopped statement: ‘One year is blank on my curriculum vitae’, reminding us how difficult life can be in a society predicated on uninterrupted work – keeping one’s nose clean. Bird’s speaker says ‘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.’ Bird’s technical control is a joy; the poem accelerates as the death is dragged out expensively, moving from end-stops and accented caesuras to excited enjambment. The expensive death suggests cocaine – so it’s fitting that Bird drags this out – line after line.

‘Patient Intake Questionnaire’ and ‘Star Vehicle’ pose question after unanswered question. ‘Patient Intake Questionnaire’ plays with the form of psychological diagnostic self-examination. Its imperatives demand responses and so, despite foregrounding the collection with Ashbery’s comment about material added by the reader, we are forced to engage with the questionnaire’s absurdity: ‘Do you peel bananas fearfully in case there is no banana inside?’ ‘Star Vehicle’ is more disturbing. This time, the poem is framed as requests, not demands. They start innocuously, and professionally: ‘Can I shoot you entirely in standard-definition digital video?’, but the poem darkens: ‘Can I shoot you suffocating inside a harp case? […] Can I shoot you shooting up? Can I shoot you shooting yourself?’ The list is exhausting. Some items, although excessive, suggest real relationships between artists and muses: ‘Can I shoot you every day for sixty-four years?’ is redolent of the relationship between the photographer Nobuyoshi Araki and his wife Yoko Aoki – whom he photographed obsessively until her death.

The collection satirises popular culture. In ‘Far From Civilisation’, ‘Gemma’s ankles were swollen / from the flight. She was ratty. / “I look like an elephant,” she said / through microscopic cheeks’. The line break forces the reader to consider, for a moment, that there might actually be something wrong with Gemma. Bird makes us wait for line two before delivering a satirical punch and exposing Gemma’s vacuous hyperbolous vanity. Perhaps Gemma, Jewel, Elle and Pixie are on a modelling shoot, but they could just as easily be on a ‘gap yah’ and the poem’s title oozes irony: our intrepid travellers may feel far from civilization but the reader is invited to draw other conclusions. ‘Stephanie’ cocks a similar snook: ‘She was eighteen, used “party” as a verb’. Tellingly, the Oxford English Dictionary’s first example of this meaning of the word is from the 1986 movie Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Bill and Ted were icons of youthful vacuity, yet it takes Stephanie, a Sally Bowles figure, to spy ‘the part worth saving in me’ suggesting that, despite it all, high culture and popular culture need one another.

The collection’s final part moves towards the light. In ‘Public Resource’, ‘There is a place called The Open / where brave people put things’, and, in ’The Amnesty’, ‘I surrender my weapons: / Catapult, Tears, Raincloud Hat, / Lip Zip, Brittle Coat, Taut Teeth / in guarded rows.’

In These Days of Prohibition takes a hard look at contemporary society but is, ultimately, uplifting. If Brett Easton Ellis wrote poems, I’d like to think they’d be poems like these.

Caroline Birds’s In These Days of Prohibition (Carcanet) is shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2017. John Field blogs at Poor Rude Lines.